I appreciate your sentiment and don't think it's "stupid complaints or nonsense" but I think you're accidentally adding FUD to the pile and stirring in wishful thinking.

#2, If Perl 5 was *ever* fast to develop in, it still is. None of the dev environments has gone away. The language and supported libraries have steadily improved, so I'd argue it's faster now than it ever was. E.g., you'll never have to roll an object system again with everything from Class::Accessor to Moose just waiting for you. And you still have the benefit of run time compilation which doesn't feel very academic when testing code every time you add a new line or two.

#3, you're talking about typing, I think. I guess it's an issue. It seems to come up a lot. I've never had a problem when I had to deal with it, with say an XML-transport to an API. There is no shortage of tools to check type manually. It might be a pain now and then but I think it would be more painful to have to deal with it in every single variable in every single piece of code.

Ruby has a great reputation. I've barely ever played with it so I'm speaking from some ignorance, still, it has many weaknesses compared to Perl 5; not universally available, slower, no native utf8, not good for systems hacking (one liners), gems < CPAN.

Others have gone after the Perl is dying meme with various job charts and such lately. It's obviously false. I chose to work with nothing but Perl 5 years ago and have not had any trouble getting jobs and even having my choice. I got a new offer out of the blue yesterday for example but like my current gig quite well.

And finally, Perl 6 - don't hold your breath. I am still looking forward to it but I stopped being excited about it a couple of years ago which was already a few years after it was started. Some of the recent buttressing of Perl 5 with stuff like Catalyst, C3, and Moose have made it easy to forget that Perl 6 felt like an immediate need in 2001. Great when it arrives, but I have a feeling that even after it does (if it ever does), it will be a couple of years before I'll move to it from Perl 5 anyway.

(update: deleted extra "g" in E.g.g; spelled "role" correctly.)