The de jure successor of Perl 5 might be Perl 6, but the de facto successor is Ruby. That is where the momentum and mindshare has gone; my impression is that Perl is easing back into it's old home as AWK's big brother. In all honesty, how often do you hear about somebody writing a web application in Perl these days? While my personal experience isn't really admissible as evidence, all the people I know who used to write web apps in Perl are now writing web apps in Ruby. A bunch of the ones who used to do system administration with Perl are now working at Opscode doing systems administration in Ruby.