Perl isn't dead, not by a long shot. Perl 6 happened too, and because compatibility was never even really a thought, renamed to Raku instead. There's been talks for a few years of finally bumping Perl's major version in order to change the defaults.

There's value in stability, though.

Maybe it's not dead. Maybe it's just finished. Does everything need to keep changing? Change isn't always improvement, and even if it is, if you have to maintain backwards compatibility, sometimes the conceptual load of having to keep the old ways and the new ways in your head all the time isn't worth it.

Maybe we should start letting things just be finished.

Perl 5 is actively developed still though, and presumable will become Perl 7 at some point.

Why does a language being stable mean it's dead? Is Awk dead?

Not making breaking changes every few years doesn't mean that the language is dead. It's still being developed and new versions of perl are still coming out.

> That's basically a side-effect of Perl being a dead language

Keeping long-term backward compatibility does not necessarily mean dying. C is 50 years old and still alive. I have written a lot more Perl than Python. IMHO, Perl is dying because its syntax is arcane and confusing. We can't solve this problem unless we design a brand new language.