- Perl 6 will STILL be in development
- You just lost 10 years of development experience and related marketability because now all those fad-du-jour systems are established industry leaders
- Nothing would have have changed back in Perl 5 land because everyone can only develop in 5.8.x or 5.10.x in case they break something.
The upside of course is that there will still be COBOL and perl programmers making a living ...
I'm trying to think of what the fads were in 2003. That was the tail end of extreme programming. Kernel03 or kernelcon or whatever it was called had a presentation about replacing devfs with udev since adsorbed into systemd. Simultaneously the new JACK system running on top of ALSA was going to take over sound on the desktop. In 2003 Moodle was the new leader of online course software. I would claim PHP4 was a very popular web programming language in 2003. Firefox was beginning its explosive growth. Bonjour/Rendezvous was new and making noise in networking. By far the most dominant handheld computing platform was the Palm, I still had my couple year old 3 and my wife had one of the M100 series. Dot-net and/or mono were going to take over the entire world; we're still waiting. I believe by this late the cuecat had already sunk along with most of the dotcom era stuff.
At this point I'm running out of ideas from 2003. I don't think "all" would be a good adjective. I'm having an easy time remembering fads that took off, and forgetting things that sank.
Seems doubtful to me. With yearly releases and a two year support cycle, only the enterprisey distribution nonsense is still infected with that particular brokenness.