Perl (v5) is still years ahead from competition in some things. Sure, in some other things it's behind - but Perl6 is about to change that.

And basicaly only thing that Perl is really lacking is good PR & Marketing. The other thing they should watch out for is to make mod_perl safe for shared hosting - that would gain many points among "plain people". Without good support for shared hosting (CGI is too slow, FastCGI isn't that much accepted - and Ruby is in same problem) Perl is basicaly cutting out lot's of "plain people" and aiming high for bigger fishes that can afford dedicated servers ...

BTW last time I heard news about Perl6 (few days ago) it said that beta version is comming out during this/next year, and "final" soon after that.

I also think that they over engineered it. Sure Parrot is nice - but somehow I got a feeling that other languages/people that will be able to run under it - aren't quite interested.

And at the end, it doesn't matter should you belive or not - go ahead be a heretic ;)