I have seen Damian's amazing presentations and I still feel sad for what's happened to Perl since he became a strong influence.

I believe he is the one who has most encouraged the tendencies which led to the Perl 6 debacle. His strong charisma has made it acceptable to have the following attitudes in the Perl 6 effort:

- Actual use by mortal programmers is boring; satisfying your desire to be brilliant and clever is what matters

- Complexity and obscurity are fun. Perl is good or popular because the language is complex, therefore the next version of Perl should be even more complex.

Perl 6 really has nothing to do with Perl 5. It's more like those movies that say "a movie by the producers of $THING_THAT_WAS_AWESOME" which neglect to mention the script and the director are different.