Exactly. Perl 6 was forever delayed, and along came Ruby. Or rather, out from the shadows came Ruby, which was already there before the Perl 6 debacle, and just needed promotion. The Pragmatic Programmer books were pretty good at pointing to this cool replacement for Perl that you never knew was already there (as well as all the buzz from the RoR folks for those of us who weren't in on the beginning)

I don't really think that the people who left perl all went to PHP.

Now if only there was a "Ruby lite" that ran more like Perl 5 (skipping the GC for reference counting and a few other performance shortcuts)