I realize it still has its die-hard supporters, but are there really new developers joining the perl community these days? I'm not trying to start a flame war here; I would be genuinely interested to know if anybody is starting a new project in perl -- who hasn't been doing perl for, say, 10+ years already.
(And yes,I realize that's what this project is trying to fix)
I do most of my programming lately in Not Quite Perl 6, a subset of Perl 6 targeting Parrot. Part of that is because it's currently the only high-level language included in Parrot's repository, and what I'm working on is mostly stuff that's in Parrot's repository(an optimization framework/tree traversal/matching language, if you're curious).
NQP is pleasant to work in. Perl 6 regexes are wonderful(although I haven't had time to work on writing a language using NQP's support for them yet).
Perl 5? I'm finding myself increasingly attracted to it, in part due to being around some very influential Perl 5 people. I haven't been using it much given that most of my coding time is currently devoted to Parrot, and most of the rest is dabbling in C+Lua, but I'm a new developer who's interested, certainly, in joining the Perl community.
It seems to my admittedly inexperienced mind like most of Perl 5's flaws are fairly avoidable with the right modules from CPAN (or even just the right modules/pragmas that ship with Perl). Sure, there's a lot of bad Perl 5 code out there, but the only languages for which that isn't true are the languages for which there isn't a lot of code of any kind out there. Perl 5 is not nearly bad enough a language to deserve its reputation. It's not nearly my idea of a perfect language, but it's a language I like and that I can stand to use while I wait for Parrot and Rakudo(assuming no other Perl 6 implementation shows up out of nowhere and somehow gets to performant and spec-complete status quicker than Rakudo) to mature, or for another language I can love to arrive on the scene(a better Common Lisp would be one of these).
Tl;dr: to answer your question, I'm a new Perl developer. I'm not really starting any substantial projects in Perl 5 yet(although I am in NQP), but when I have more free time on my hands, I am confident that I will.
I do have extensive experience with PHP, some personal projects in C++ and have written some very useful (for me) Lisp code.
Perl seems to be a Lisp without macros (lisp-macros) with C-ish syntax. Actually, with lots of ready to use macros, but without the easy possibility of adding your own macros. And it is faster than PHP, Python, Ruby, etc. So it has been good so far.
Judging from IRC and perlmonks.org there are tons of newbies trying to do real work. I gather the growth of CPAN and core contributors indicate growing growth.
I am genuinely curious where you got your ideas about on perl usage?
Regardless of growth or decline in any of Perl, Python, and Ruby, my opinion is they're so equivalent it's barely worth discussing them separately. Pick the one that has the libraries and frameworks you need. It so happens that http://search.cpan.org is the easiest way to check up on libraries for any of the languages.
Perl6, if they ever pull off a fast and stable release, is another matter. It's likely to be a game changer. I actually quite dislike this perl5i thing and the declarex syntax changing modules in general because they needlessly fragment the language.
I'm not sure what you mean by equivalent but would all 3 exist if they didn't have significant differences? Would they have gone off in search of the Holy Grail with Perl 6 if Perl didn't have a few nasty issues that needed to be cleaned up. I'm one of those guys who has used Perl for over 10 years. It was wilting and I'm glad to see some new life being breathed back into it.
It means that for basic stuff they are pretty much the same. Variables & data structures (scalars, arrays, mappings), creating and calling functions, creating and instantiating classes, looping, if/then/else, talking to the network, talking to the OS, talking to the db, etc. This basic stuff is in all these languages; the only real differences are in the syntax (and that's not even very different).
For many programming tasks, you're just doing these basics over and over again. Any language will work, so you may as well pick one that's got it where it counts -- modules, since that will make the most difference in how much extra code you have to write. And Perl wins that competition with the CPAN.
> Would they have gone off in search of the Holy Grail with Perl 6 ...
Thing is, it's not a Holy Grail. It's just the next revision of Perl. Take a look at some example Perl 6 code online; they've cleaned things up, fixed some boo-boos, and upon seeing it I expect you'll matter-of-factly say, "oh, yeah, still looks like Perl :)".
Perl6 was started in the year 2000. It's a lot more than a rev from 5.08 to 5.12, for example. Can you elaborate on some of the more details? For example, what concepts from Ruby and Python are they borrowing in Perl6 that don't exist in Perl5? Wikipedia didn't elaborate.
Actually melling, thanks for calling me on that. Thinking more about it, I think Perl 6 actually has 2 sides: one is the "like Perl 5 but with a number of things improved/cleaned-up", and the other side (which I neglected to think about in my post above) is indeed some major and sophisticated changes (many of which I know little about since I most often use Perl in a simplistic way -- do this, open that file, process these log files, etc.).
If you have some specific questions, I suggest asking them at http://perl6.org/community/irc , which I've found to be very friendly and helpful.
I think this CPAN module is a great idea, but is there any team of Perl programmers that would consent to actually using this? It seems that anyone who thinks this module is a good idea would already be using a different language entirely. I say this as someone who in the past year or two has had to work with a team of Perl coders, and most of them could care less about the awesomeness that this module has to offer. I couldn't even get them to agree on a uniform exception-handling strategy! do_blah or die "failz"; was good enough for them. :)
As a Perl coder: No, we're still using Perl. And Exceptions are pretty common these days, so I wouldn't blame the experience you had on the language, but rather on the people.
(And yes,I realize that's what this project is trying to fix)