I'm curious why you don't seem to see Ponie as that Perl5/Perl6 bridge you seem to allude to. Or is it just that you fear that Perl6 will stop things from progressing down the Perl5 path? I am a 5 year Perl programmer and also have some concerns about total abandonment of Perl5, since we have a significant Perl5 code base. But the reality I see is a bit different (perhaps tainted by similar large rewrite experiences in other software areas). I see Perl6 as having to start anew to offer the big changes seen as necessary by the Perl community. I don't see it being widely used for a while, which would mean that the community would do what we'd expect and provide suitable bridges and migration paths. I also see that the move on all fronts towards VM run-time environments means that as we move towards Perl6, another change is taking place that makes the actual languages you use and mix in a given environment start to become less important. In the end, I'm not sure the migration scenario ends up all that different from what you lay out, except for the fact that it starts with two distinct entities, rather than starting with the idea of building on one. There are previous models for this sort of approach that prove it can work and migration can be less painful than it seems when that first divide is presented.

I'd be interested to hear you elaborate on your thoughts here. At the rate offshoring is going I might be lucky to be programming in any language in 2-3 years. ;-)