Contrary to popular belief Perl is still very much alive and healthy. Sure, it has baggage, but so does any language that kept evolving for decades. If you want to know what Perl really looks like these days take a look at the Modern Perl book (http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl/) and Mojolicious web framework. (http://mojolicio.us)
Sure, but the next problem is documentation, suddenly you have very different and incompatible examples for different languages. Possibly even between different drivers for the same language. MongoDB gets that part very right, you can apply pretty much all documentation to all drivers, with minimal changes.
All that lambda and operator overloading magic makes the development of new drivers a lot more complicated than it has to be. And i wouldn't be surprised if some languages end up feeling like second class citizens in the RethinkDB eco system because of it.
One could argue that once a startup becomes an elephant it might not actually be a startup anymore. There are many big and successful Perl companies less than 10 years old, just not much buzz around them, because they never needed it. Perl has simply become an industry standard for tasks that involve a lot of text processing, not unlike C for system programming.
Wide adoption of SPDY also seems like quite an overstatement, a few big players have been trying it, but the only number we have so far is 339 SSL certificates used with SPDY-enabled servers in may 2012. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2012/05/02/may-2012-web-se...
Worst of all is that compression is stateful, you need to capture the whole HTTP/2.0 session to be able to reconstruct any information with mandatory HTTP/2.0 debug tools.
Google is the industry's most active and effective corporate advocate for TLS simply because it makes tracking users and selling targeted advertising a whole lot easier. Their involvement in the whole PRISM affair has undoubtedly demonstrated that privacy is none of their concern.