Which starts off with "If you were to search the internet for recent articles about Perl, you might well be led to believe that the language hasn't changed in the last twenty years."
My guess is that since older versions of Perl are mostly adequate and code targetting them continued to work year after year, there was little motivation to check out new features of Perl.
I use Perl full time and I know what they've added, but it's not a lot if you compare to other languages such as Python. Lexical filehandles were added in 2002. 'say' is just print except it adds a newline. Function signatures are a good addition, but that also took them about 15 years to implement due to bikeshedding.
Luckily Perl is so powerful that third party modules can do pretty much anything. There have been modules out for 10+ years that hack the parser and added function signatures (with types!) to the language before Perl did. Unfornaturely they're buggy and if you make a syntax error the output makes no sense :P
I read that as "Perl has remain stable for over 20 years".
The perception that it has stagnated appears to be poor marketing for the new features. For example, this article from 2022-09-08:
https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/09/08/this-is-not-your-grand...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32767218
Which starts off with "If you were to search the internet for recent articles about Perl, you might well be led to believe that the language hasn't changed in the last twenty years."
My guess is that since older versions of Perl are mostly adequate and code targetting them continued to work year after year, there was little motivation to check out new features of Perl.