Ponie, for the uninitiated, is Perl 5 running on top of Parrot (the new internal engine for a Perl 6 and a number of other languages that will most likely be released before Perl 6).

I expect Ponie to grow up and become a fine stallion (reach production quality) before Perl 6 does, so it will probably be Parrot and Ponie driving maturation of Perl 6 than the other way around. Which is a good thing, since Ponie should be able to run Perl5 code unmodified. And faster than current Perl. And with the ability to use code libraries from other Parrot languages (including Perl 6).