Hi Joseph Welcome, and I hope you'll stick around.
Now, I haven't had the time to dig into Perl 6 myself, only to poke at it from time to time. But, while waiting for people who know something to respond, I'll ask you to be a little concise in certain areas.
* I can find no concise easy-to-understand explanation for how to define what other languages would call constructors. Instead there is a mess of bless, magic inside Mu, new, BUILD, BUILDALL... It's not clear when you should prefer to override BUILD or new or both. I also assume there are some benefits to teasing apart object construction this way, but right now I don't know what they are. This is also an area where I think there are older blog posts confusing the situation because they discuss semantics from an older version of Perl6.
I wonder what you miss from https://docs.perl6.org/language/classtut. To me, it explains the hows and whys very thoroughly. Now, I now people have been hard at work improving the documentation, so if you can point to what's missing or unclear, I'm sure it will help a lot.
* It would be nice for people coming from Python for a tutorial that explained the basic module importing, the scope of things imported, and how name collisions are avoided when importing from two modules that have the same sub. The official documentation is trying to distinguish a bunch of subtle and presumably useful for advanced users distinctions that are completely lost on a newcomer. I just want to know what is the equivalent of import, from foo import bar, and import foo as bar.
It sounds like "arh, do it yourself", but I'd like to say that, coming from a Python background, you'd be the perfect person to do just that. At least take notes and post them, so it can go into a tutorial of some kind.
* Coming from almost any other language the => operator is dark magic because of its implicit quoting of the left hand side. Likewise the implicit quoting done by <foo>. Some explanation of why this is done, and how you could write a sub or operator that does the same thing would probably go a long way towards making it less confusing.
The pair operator is explained here https://docs.perl6.org/language/operators#index-entry-pair_constructor and word quoting here https://docs.perl6.org/language/quoting#Word_quoting:_qw - perhaps they're more Perl 5-like, but both are very handy features. Perhaps you can expand a little as to what you'd like explained. Coming from Perl 5, I'm certainly damaged in that respect.
* I haven't been able to find any guidance on when I should be using a role and when I should be using a class. The former seem to give you better error messages when you forget to define a method from a base role... So never use classes? I suspect it's more complicated than that.
I guess this is something everybody can have an opinion about. There are a number of reasons to go one or the other way. Isn't it a topic for all modern languages?
* Types feel like second-class citizens. Without knowing the details of the implementation it feels like the errors that Perl can statically detect is chosen at random. It's generally useful
I think your wording is misleading. The things that Perl 6 can detect when compiling shouldn't be a matter of choice, but of what's possible. Perhaps you can give some examples, I'm sure there are perfectly good reasons for the way things are. If not, it may be a bug, and the compiler can be improved.
argument constructors, are all pretty sweet as well. Macros look pretty promising although again I had trouble finding good tutorials.
As I recall it, macros where left out of the initial implementation. So you have to wait for another Christmas Present :-)
/kaare
