Perl6 is not dead. I think the basic idea behind perl6 was good, but they had to release a few years ago to be relevant. Now they will have hard time competing against ruby or python. We will see, thought.
A lot of people were burnt by unmaintainable Perl codebases in the 90s. Right now, even if I wanted to, I couldn't start a new Perl project at my company, its reputation is too bad. People who left Perl for Python or Ruby won't be back - ever.