Perl 5 Is Not Going Away.

Perl 5.8.0 was released after the announcement of Perl 6. Perl 5.8.1 will be released shortly. Perl 5.9.0 is in development to become Perl 5.10.0 within the next year or two.

Ponie will let you run Perl 5 code on Parrot for years to come.

If your project is useful, by all means start it! Perl 6 won't be out within six months, and even if it were, that wouldn't make all Perl 5 code magically go away.

Perl is not going away. The sky is not falling. Continue as normal.