It really does look like Perl has seen it's best years on the basis of those stats. Unless people are finding some other source of support and assistance.

One wonders what it would take to re-invigorate interest? Will 5.10 have sufficient new features or improvements to rekindle the flame? Would an installable version of Perl 6 with sufficent performance to at least equal Perl 5 do the trick?

I've been looking to find an alternative to Perl in order to take many of my interesting projects further. The single biggest reason is sub/method call performance that means that every layer of abstraction you add, the slower the code runs. I've stalled on several projects because I've initially started out with nicely structured code only to find myself de-structuring it to try and recover some performance. Perl OO is just so slow. I've investigated writing OO using Inline::C, but even then the wrapping process that mates C to XS to Perl just sucks away most of the performance gains. Writing XS directly can save some of that, but then you're in a whole other world of pain.

I'd love the idea of moving on to Perl 6, but it's current levels of performance preclude that.

There are plenty of alternatives, but none of them have the flexiblity of Perl. And each seems to have some quirk or caveat that niggles me enough that I end up back in Perl.