When it comes to embracing "embrace and extend", Perl 6 is exceptionally promiscuous in selectively borrowing from other languages (and Perl 6 is very tenacious about refining and generalizing their best ideas). Here is a brief summary of some notable Perl 6 features, starting from the list in the FAQ, plus a variety of additions and extensions:
- optional explicit strong typing
- proper parameter lists
- active metadata on values, variables, subroutines, and types
- declarative classes with strong encapsulation
- full OO exception handling
- support for the concurrent use of multiple versions of a module
- extensive and powerful introspection facilities (including of POD)
- LL and LR grammars (including a built-in grammar for Perl 6 itself)
- subroutine overloading
- multiple dispatch (multimethods)
- named arguments
- a built-in switch statement
- hierarchical construction and destruction
- distributive method dispatch
- method delegation
- named regexes
- overlapping and exhaustive regex matches within a string
- named captures
- parse-tree pruning
- incremental regex matching against input streams
- macros (that are implemented in Perl itself)
- full Unicode processing support
- user-definable operators (from the full Unicode set)
- chained comparisons
- a universally accessible aliasing mechanism
- lexical exporting (via a cleaner, declarative syntax)
- multimorphic equality tests
- state variables
- hypothetical variables
- hyperoperators (i.e. vector processing)
- function currying
- junctions (i.e. superpositional values, subroutines, and types)
- coroutines
- better threading
- better garbage collection
- much better foreign function interface (cross-language support)
- invariant sigils, plus twigils (minimalist symbolic "Hungarian")
- many widely useful objects/types
- lazy evaluation (including virtual infinite lists)
- An overridable and reusable grammar
Holy freaking cow! How can most mere-mortals contend with all this stuff? Well, the good news is that you most likely won't ever need to know (or use) much of this stuff. You can learn and use a moderate and comfortable subset of Perl 6 that meets your typical needs. However these features provide an extremely powerful toolkit for experts to produce modules and other tools that you can use (without you needing to know about their internal wiring and plumbing). Perhaps counterintuitively, many of these features will make Perl 6 substantially easier and simpler than Perl 5 for more advanced applications (once you get used to it). Many of these features will also help "future-proof" Perl 6 by providing many means of incorporating new extensions.
As you can see, Perl 6 thus takes the powerful evolutionary advantages of "hybrid vigor" to new extremes. First there was "extreme programming", now we have Perl 6, "the first extreme programming language". If you think our many friends, including {Ruby, Python, Smalltalk, Lisp, Haskell, and others}, are generally more {cool, powerful, productive, and fun} than {C, C++, Java, C#}, then you'll likely recognize Perl 6 as the new "top of the food tool chain" for practical high-powered fun.
