Softdrinks? Really! The reason for Perl's demise isn't petty "taste" or transient winds. This is a trend; and, you arguing that it's cyclical or that Perl programmers should expect a reversal in this trend is an indicator, to me anyway, of abject delusion.
I'm a CPAN developer (pause: ECARROLL). Moose is great, if it wasn't for Moose I'd have entirely stopped using Perl. The big problem with Perl is more the community than the software. The pressure is constantly on backwards compatibility: that makes corporations and foundations happy, but it doesn't make the platform attractive to new generations. Look at the Unicode "preamble" in the New Perl Unicode Cookbook. The community needs to start talking about how they want to /do/ Unicode (and other new features like mro) then they need to set sensible defaults and roll out and market a new version. You're not going to get people excited about the software if you're constantly making a statement no more ambitious then "the desired effect is still possible if..." That's mighty lackluster this day and age.
Let's start a serious discussion about revamping docs, acknowledging that new programmers don't like procedural-legacy interfaces with supremely awkward declarations, making Moose and namespace::autoclean a default for all Perl modules, rewriting Unicode defaults, utilizing mro, enabling autodie, yanking indirect object invocation. Let's start imagining a Perl5 and optimizing for anything other than backwards compatibility.
Maybe it's time Perl got some new fancy datatypes? I sure like Data.Set in Haskell.
I'm not speaking of implementation, I'm speaking of an attitude that will walk the language into the grave. Perl can do it all, but there is a reason why increasingly people are opting for it to stay away.
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