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Its inventor -- Lary Wall -- talks about individual grammar rules and module enhancements that will have a powerful impact on development -- Lary Wall on Perl 6 . But at a higher level, one cannot ignore how Perl 6 has taken similar approaches to Java and .NET

First there was Java with its "Write once run everywhere", taking Java code to an intermediate state which could later be executed on a runtime on different platforms, then .NET came along with MSIL/CLI which allowed you to take various languages -- namely C#, VB.NET, C++, Java, among others -- and make them execute seamlessly under the same environment or .NET runtime, now Perl 6 is taking a similar approach.

Perl 6 will effectively separate the process of parsing and executing programs. Quoting the Perl 6 site : You'll be able to write your program in Perl 6, Perl 5, TCL, Python, or any other language that there's a parser written for. Interchangeable runtime engines let you interpret your bytecode or convert it to something else (e.g., Java, C, or even back to Perl).

Its seems like an extremely ambitious undertaking, even more so than the Mono Project which aims to provide a .NET runtime for Unix environments, reason why Perl 6 has probably been in development for some time.

While its doubtful Perl 6 will mark an adoption shift with Java or .NET developers, its never the less an interesting approach that what was once considered a Hacker's language, is taking the same route as its mainstream counterparts.