Open Question: I realise I haven't kept up with every detail since the Perl6 RFC I submitted way back in August 2000, but boy was I surprised to find, now that I can actually use Perl6, it isn't just an improvement to Perl (5), it's actually a "different language" (I'm quoting Michael Schwern there, I'm not the first to notice this).
Now personally, I like learning new languages. I'm studying Ruby now, and will probably play with Haskell, as well as Perl6. It's fun for me. But knowing the people who have to sign paycheques over to us developers as I do, I can say with some certainty: 1) they aren't at all interested in our fun, 2) they actually consider lots of new and different languages in their production code base to be scary, and 3) if it ain't broke they will not want to spend money or effort to fix it. So my question to the list is, in simple terms even an IT manager could grasp, explain what problems Perl 5 has that Perl 6 fixes, such that they would want to undergo the pain of ever switching. --michael <onperl.org>
