I'm talking about rate of change in the core language. Nobody sane would look at Perl 5 and say "ayup, this is an excellent stopping point, this language is a perfect distillation of the core Perl ideals and idioms". And yet despite fewer hindrances than Java, Perl has stagnated just as much. (If you want to talk modules and unreleased languages you might as well bring in Clojure, Scala, Jython, etc.) If you really want to be embarrassed by Perl's stagnation, compare it to Python, Ruby, or even C#.