But Perl 5 is _not_ dead. The camel lives, and has two humps. The "lost decade" cannot be ascribed only to Perl 6. Developers were leaving in droves to newer dynamic languages of the same generation (Python, PHP, and eventually Ruby).

I can agree that it had an influence, but I'm sick of the Perl 5 perspectives that a) the language is flawless and only an idiot would choose something else, b) Perl 6 pointed to flaws which don't exist because hand-waving, Rule A, etc.

Perl 5 has fundamental problems. At first Perl 6 was an attempt to solve those problems without a complete compatability break. That proved impossible, so the scope expanded to be a new Perl.

"But it's painting a bad picture of Perl 5!"

Perl 5 painted it's own picture, I'm sorry to say. The toxicity of p5p, the constant "this language is fine why are you making a new one", the over-confidence that Perl 5 is a pinnacle of how you can design a Perl language... these are Perl 5 things, and they belong to Perl 5. Yet I rarely see Perl 5 programmers owning to these facts.

It's just tired. You yourself did a great job in breathing new life into Perl 5, as part of the Modern Perl movement, which takes as its starting point that Perl 5 allows some seriously flawed programming. Techniques and ideas borrowing from Perl 6 are used to make life easier in Perl 5, developed during the "lost decade".

So, I'm sticking to my position that this whole line of thinking is just tired. For outsiders, Perl 5 was a non-starter because of all the flaws with the language, not because another version was in the pipeline that promised to fix those flaws.

FWIW, I program in Perl 5 every day, and I really enjoy the language.