The excitement is gone because only Perl programmers like Perl. I spend a lot of time in other programming language communities and each one is a silo. Each language is the One True Language(tm) and they spend a lot of time and effort proving it. They spend a lot of time building and testing libraries that were already built and tested in other languages. While they all dislike one another they all have one thing in common: their dislike of Perl. It's practically the only thing they can all agree on: Perl sucks.

I don't even do much programming in Perl these days, but it's not because Perl sucks: I fortunately know better. The problem is that no one else does. The people who have programmed in Perl and say it sucks are the people who feel like they've escaped tyranny or dodged a bullet. They either got into Perl early on and had a tough time with it until another language gave them their breakthrough epiphany or they were handed a poorly developed project by one of those people and had a tough time with it. Anyone who hasn't programmed in Perl and claims it sucks are just spreading the meme.

In any case, there are two different Perls in the world: there's "Perl" the eight-tonne monstrosity that no programmer in their right mind should go near; and there's Perl the pragmatic, stable, and reliable programming language. One is a giant FUD ball that the public sees and the other is one that only Perl programmers see. The trick I think will be to expose the monster for what it is and show people the real Perl.

S. Lott from the Python community makes a good point. Well actually, Dijkstra made the point. I think it's a pretty good one that Perl could exploit quite well. Just my 0.02 cents.