[sevrinsky]

Speaking as a long-time Perl monger (Perl5 has been 80%+ of my day job for most of the last 25 years):

Perl6 was definitely a fiasco that contributed to Perl5's demise. The active support in the ecosystem was divided between the "two Perls" and sapped the driving forces in the community.

Perl5, like any other language, needs constant maintenance and growth in order to interact with modern tools and frameworks. For example, Protobuf and gRPC only work with a particular module (Google::ProtocolBuffers::Dynamic) which requires an arcane series of dependencies.

Remember that a language is much more than just the semantics and the batteries-included libraries with the core. On the module and community side, Perl has been in free fall for the last decade.