Your comment actually made me scroll back to the top to double check this thread was actually about Perl 6, not Perl 5!<p>Part of the point of Perl 6 was to address problems in the language and Larry (and&#x2F;or those who wrote the original Perl 6 RFCs) considered several of the things you named to be problems.<p>&gt; wide range of special operators, variables and default arguments<p>In Perl 6:<p>* The only special op I&#x27;m aware of is assignment.<p>* The only variables considered special are the &quot;it&quot; and &quot;them&quot; variables ($_, @_ and %_), the current match object ($&#x2F;), and the current exception list ($!).<p>* There are still predefined variables, such as a DISTRO variable which contains an object representing the OS etc. on which Perl 6 is running, but I haven&#x27;t found those problematic.<p>* Almost all use of default arguments in built-ins has been eliminated. The main exception I&#x27;m aware of is that subs and ops related to matching still default to operating on &quot;it&quot;.<p>The Perl 5 &lt;&gt; op is gone.<p>&gt; Or, perhaps the syntax for dealing with elements in a somewhat deep data structure, like: push(@{$TV{$family}{kids}},&quot;anotherkid&quot;);<p>This would be something like this in Perl 6:<p><pre><code>  my %TV;
  my $family = &#x27;foo&#x27;;
  push %TV{$family}&lt;kids&gt;, &#x27;another&#x27;; 
</code></pre>
&gt; Sometimes, people are just griping about regex syntax though, which seems disingenuous, since many languages use the exact same pcre expressions.<p>This is talked of in Perl 6 circles as being ironic because regex syntax has been thoroughly cleaned up (and massively powered up too) in Perl 6.[1]<p>&gt; I like perl, but if it&#x27;s been a while, there&#x27;s definitely some back and forth with books to decipher something I wrote some time ago.<p>One of the many downsides to Perl 6, imo, is that this back-to-the-book-oh-yeah aspect is still there -- but there&#x27;s only incomplete doc and no books yet written by the likes of Larry.<p>[1] See, for example, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;moritz&#x2F;json&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;lib&#x2F;JSON&#x2F;Tiny&#x2F;Grammar.pm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;moritz&#x2F;json&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;lib&#x2F;JSON&#x2F;Tiny&#x2F;Gra...</a>