Yeah... sometime around 2007 or so they finally admitted as much and started updating Perl 5 more regularly. But it's been a ridiculous journey. No project that starts out to rewrite a long-established and entrenched piece of software from the ground up ever ends up being a smooth transition. It's best to admit as soon as it's clear what's happening that you are doing something entirely new, and let the old project live out its own lifecycle.
What I've heard about Perl 6 does sound intriguing, and probably a solid language platform does take a good decade-plus to get on solid footing. But re-using the name of a once-well-loved and established language is a bad move for both the old and the new versions.
The progress on Perl 5 has been remarkable too. Complex data structures no longer require you to wave a dead chicken and spelunk through StackExchange for hours. Unicode just works most of the time. Useful new features appear in the language, even though you would rightfully expect it to be in maintenance mode.
> Complex data structures no longer require you to wave a dead chicken
Do you have a reference on changes to data structure syntax in 5.x? Probably my biggest frustration was trying to use anything beyond a scalar list - it always ended up a mess of hashrefs.
What I've heard about Perl 6 does sound intriguing, and probably a solid language platform does take a good decade-plus to get on solid footing. But re-using the name of a once-well-loved and established language is a bad move for both the old and the new versions.