Perl 6 has very ambitious goals. One aspect of Perl 6 is it pays extreme emphasis on sane, safe extensibility. Perl 6 grammars are killer features. For all those people who wanted lisp like extensibility inside C kind of a language, Perl 6 will be a perfect match.

Given those goals, Perl as a language has a long bright future. Because flexible and extensible languages evolve their way out of time.

Compared to all languages in its class, Perl hasn't broken backwards compatibility since past 25 years. Python had to break it for some very simple syntax changes. Perl has never done it, not even once in past 25 years. That is quite a feat considering so much syntax has been added to the language since then. Perl 5 has also found a way to add more syntax without dealing with the core by modules like Devel::Declare.

So Perl evolution is set for many years. You will see it evolve grow. New neat ideas and many like Moose will find their way into Perl.

Basically what makes it special is its hackable, flexible and extensible. And such languages generally stay around for a long time.