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Perl objects are hacked on, somewhat painfully at that.

Sure, if you're writing them the way they were built in 1994 or cobbling terrible examples from Matt's Script Archive. Anyone that actually takes Perl even remotely seriously stopped doing that ages ago. We've all moved on to using Moose or something like it.

OO la la! Look, you're a great gal, but you're certainly not anywhere near as well endowed in THAT department.

You might want to take another look. Perl got some serious implants.

Perl 6 is still being worked on, but it's more of a proving ground for new features and new ideas. It'll be ready when it's ready. Meanwhile, many of the good ideas from Perl 6 have made their way into Perl 5 releases. Useful things such as Moose, smart matching, and other things. Hopefully others will reply with more details.

Ruby is *not* basically Perl, I've used both for quite a while now. Ruby's concepts are much easier to comprehend and use in everyday coding.

That's a matter of opinion. I personally find Perl to be a better (more expressive) language for most tasks. Mostly I use Ruby (JRuby, specifically) when I have to write code that will run in a JVM, otherwise I default to Perl. RubyGems is nice, but it's still (at least) a decade behind CPAN. I'll grant you that Perl's learning curve is steeper than Ruby's, but I'll maintain that it's worth the effort.

Classes are not some weird afterthought that feels like it's falling apart every second now, they are first class members.

I'll give you that one for classic Perl OO. OTOH, Moose solves most of those complaints. Moose is basically a backport of Perl6's OO system, which is heavily influenced by Ruby's. This gives you pretty much everything you need to do serious OOP without having to drink the everything-is-an-object kool-aid.

The Perl interpreter is way quicker, which is nice,

Even nicer is the ability to use other (faster) languages inline once you've identified hotspots in your code through profiling. I am not aware of anything in Ruby that can compare to the simple elegance of Inline::C for this purpose.

there's sooo much unnecessary syntactic explicitness compared to Ruby.

Huh? Examples, please. "Syntactic explicitness" is NOT a complaint that's levied against Perl often.

Perl has regexes. It also has a really twisted OO system -- elegant in its own way, but I don't know why you'd choose that if you have alternatives. It has ugly syntax, even when you know what you're doing. Anti-patterns are the default -- like, say, ignoring errors unless you explicitly handle them.

This criticism that used to apply 15 years ago, but is not really relevant anymore. The Perl community has gone to great lengths to address these things.

For OO, nowadays there is Moose, which is an excellent and extremely capable OO framework for Perl. Please check it out if you like.

For the anti-patterns, please note that strict mode is now the default on Perl 5.14 and I cannot think of a modern library ignoring errors by default. The error ignoring behavior is there for a bunch of built-in stuff that needs to maintain compatibility with old code, but you can, and are encouraged to, include the autodie pragma to change even that behavior.

About the syntax, it's probably a matter of personal taste, so I can't say anything about that. But I believe that personal taste doesn't have to do with whether you know what you're doing or not.

Lastly, writing Perl doesn't mean that your code has to be ugly and error-prone. May I suggest Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices, which IMHO is an excellent book with recommended coding practices.

Hope this helps!...

"I was just going to say that back in about 2001 someone gave me advice not to learn Perl 5 because a Perl 6 release was imminent."

It's a shame that this 'Osborne effect' has hung over Perl for the last decade. I wonder how Perl 5 would now be perceived if Perl 6 had been given a different name and announced as a research project into language development, rather than the next version of Perl? With better PR, Perl 5.10 could easily have been 'Perl 6'.

All this tends to obscure the quet evolution of Perl 5 programming into what 'chromatic' and others are calling 'Modern Perl', using an idiomatic style that takes full advantage of recent language features (some borrowed from Perl 6) and CPAN to write efficient and maintainable code:

http://www.modernperlbooks.com/
http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/

As always, a lot of the most active development is happening outside the core language. Anyone interested in some of the directions Perl 5 is going in today ought to check out projects like these:

http://www.iinteractive.com/moose/
http://plackperl.org/
http://www.catalystframework.org/
http://mojolicio.us/

Big object-oriented stuff, in particular, is just kinda painful.

Not really. I find it rather enjoyable.

Perhaps you have not heard of Moose.

Please use Moose then... http://www.iinteractive.com/moose/

Do you really think Perl did not evolve over the years ... *sigh*