I too have been fearful of the upcoming Perl 6 release. I don't want to completely relearn the language, and I do not wish that the easy to use Perl 5 syntax will change. However, I trust Larry Wall and the other Perl 6 developers will make a comparable (and hopefully better) language. These are the same people that have written the other versions of Perl, so I doubt they will wander far from Perl's current path. From what I have read so far, the changes that they are making are extremely good.
.