Good things that happened in the last 3 years? Well, unicode support is basically stable and done as far as the perl core is concerned.

The fact that you can do more-or-less transparent unicode alone is reason enough for me to prefer perl over the other Ps in the LAMP stack for web development. Even Ruby/Rails, which I like a lot get many -- points for not even trying to do the right thing.

People in the USA might disagree, but then, they're not dealing with something like 12+ different natural languages within a 90 minutes flight.