This is impossibly exciting. Most people don&#x27;t realize it yet, but it&#x27;s like a programming language hand grenade just went off in the world...little bits of the new paradigms in Perl 6 are going to start winding their way into languages of the future.<p>I first remember learning about rumors around the development of Perl 6 about the time I picked up Perl 5 for the first time. I had been doing a bunch of C and C++ code (and a smattering of Java) up to that point, but coding in Perl was like hitting the idea accelerator. At the time (programming resources on the Internet were few and far between) I didn&#x27;t even know where to <i>look</i> to find resources to do things in C++ that were quick one-off scripts in Perl. Need CGI? No problem. Mucking around with a database, here ya go.<p>I jettisoned C++ and dove heavily into Perl for years after that. I&#x27;m pretty sure that Perl made me a much worse programmer (it turns laziness into a kind of opiate), but a better conceptual developer -- I now had a much better idea of what computers could do, and didn&#x27;t have to reinvent an entire civilization every time I wanted to do something (not a joke, where and when I worked, I was partially responsible for working on a pre-STL String library for C++, that&#x27;s where we were in the world). Perl was really the first time I had encountered the productivity benefits a true high-level language could bring.<p>I&#x27;ve since abandoned Perl and have moved onto Python for day-to-day. There&#x27;s lots of electrons spilled by many former Perlers who&#x27;ve made similar transitions. I&#x27;ve never really <i>liked</i> Python in the same way I liked writing Perl. With Python I&#x27;ve always felt like I&#x27;m assembling Tinker Toys or an erector set into a thing. It&#x27;s quick to build and it works in the end but there&#x27;s not much passion in it. With Perl I always felt like I was writing poetry -- code just sort of fell out of me.<p>I thought about checking out Go, but there&#x27;s something about the sort of terse opinion the language designers have about the language that&#x27;s made me feel like the entire language is a premature optimization that&#x27;s going to go stale quick.<p>Perl 6 feels like we&#x27;ve just entered a new evolutionary period, where we&#x27;ve been given all new tools, where the opinion is careful inclusionism. It&#x27;s like being stuck writing couplets and haiku in Perl 5 and now we can write anything.<p>Congratulations Larry et. al. This has been a long time coming, and I hope this is an amazing start!