That said, I think Python has eaten Perl's lunch, and who knows how things will evolve with the proliferation of statically-typed, non-verbose, fast functional languages? Personally, I'm not going back to dynamic languages as my primary workhorse.
- grammars
- grapheme-based Unicode
- implicit parallelism
This is why Perl6 is still relevant today. Larry is hopeful that Rakudo can deliver sometime next year (not all of these features are quite there yet), but even if it doesn't, the language will remain of interest as long as there is no serious contender in sight.
Yes, Haskell is better known, but not proliferated in real-world usage (though jq was based on it). F# and Scala aren't seeing much adoption.
I do think type inference will be borrowed from them (and pr many other features), but not pure fp (it makes some tasks unnecessarily difficult). The growth of dynamic typed languages suggests to me that developers value ease of development over almost everthing.