Don't underestimate the effect that the Perl 6 disaster has had on the reputation of Perl as a whole, even if Perl 6 is a rather different language in many ways, and generally promoted by a separate community.

Even if the Perl 5 community has generally admitted that Perl 6 was a failure and has moved on, a lot of people first think about how disastrous Perl 6 was well before they think about anything positive involving Perl 5.

> The spectre of perl6 stopped bothering us about 2006

From a practical usage standpoint, sure. But wouldn't you agree that an effective major version freeze has had a chilling effect on the progression of the language?

I'd argue it's had a deleterious effect to varying degrees, even since 2006. It's not enough for a community to be not bothered. They need to be energized, and it's tough to make the argument that the perl6 snafu has been helpful to the perl movement.

> CPAN uploads have been up every year since.

CPAN traffic was down over 10% last year, according to Alexa. In fact, many perl popularity metrics were down at least 10% in 2013. [0]

My experience, admittedly anecdotal, is that CPAN packages in general are not maintained with the same vigor as in years past. But why would they be, if people are moving their focus to other languages?

Regarding Moo, thanks - I'll definitely have a look.

[0] http://szabgab.com/the-popularity-of-perl-in-2013.html