I have to admit that I had many of the same concerns as you, but the more I thought about it the less I worried. Perl 5 is an awesome language that has almost endless capability. Perl 5 will be here if Perl 6 fails and will get many benefits from those with Perl 6 and Parrot experience.

If Perl 6 makes its released, it will sell itself. Perl 5 had almost endless capability. Perl 6 will have endless capability. It has everything Perl 5 does (syntax changes omitted), plus a more powerful re engine, a new easy-to-use class mechanism, coroutines, continuations, and an extensible virtual machine. Plus the re engine that is used to compile the language can be altered - imagine the possibilities!

Cheers,

John

p.s. - its been a while since I looked at Perl 6 so it has probably gotten better than I described...