This is great to hear. Perl has been really hurting because none of the important people are employed by big companies with lots of money to spend, and none of the big Perl users really donate much money. That means Perl6 has been strictly volunteer-only up until now. (There has been a bit of money, but most people can't just take a month off from work and live on a grant.)
It has felt kind of like the corporate support has waned a bit in recent years...and some of it (like scientific computing, which was momentarily a bright spot for commercial Perl) has gone elsewhere, like Python. I worked on SciPy and for its corporate sponsors at Enthought for a couple of years, and it was very interesting to note the difference between the two cultures and where development was/is coming from. A very large percentage of Python development, including development of the language itself, is happening within the corporate world, while Perl is almost entirely volunteer driven.
I'm not sure the volunteer nature is entirely positive. Ruby, with the advent of the extremely commercially oriented Ruby on Rails, saw tremendous growth in a very short time. It takes a combination of forces to build products that are beautiful inside and out, and even the best Perl projects only ever really get the inner beauty going on. We've got more/better libraries than any other language, and yet, folks think coding in PHP is easier. It's a strange phenomenon.
I think what I'm trying to say is: The Perl community needs more great web designers. Oh, wait...We're talking about money and Perl 6. Right. So, having real money to get Perl 6 out the door faster is the definition of awesome.
Anyway, we're doing our part: We're sponsors of the upcoming YAPC, and plan to crank up our involvement (both monetarily and codewise) in the community by an order of magnitude over the next year.
It's actually pretty well-timed, I think, though a couple of years head start wouldn't have hurt. It's true that there are several Perlmongers who've jumped ship for Ruby (and I don't blame them--I wouldn't hesitate to do a new project in Ruby, as it's like Perl with all of the rusty nails polished away) or Smalltalk or Haskell or whatever. But, I think the Parrot+Perl6 effort is still interesting, and still quite viable.
The thing is, it's only been in the past two years that anyone thought to put dynamic languages onto a "generic" VM like CLR or JVM. Given that both tend to fight dynamic language designers hardest on those features that make them "dynamic", this new interest across the spectrum is a great place for Perl6 and Parrot to grow up.
Here's the thing...The JVM is awesome as a platform for new languages because of its huge library--one can build a new language from scratch while avoiding the biggest burden developers using new languages face, which is a dearth of libraries. That's the one redeeming thing about Java, is its incredibly huge library.
But, here's the kicker: Perl has even broader library coverage than Java (unbelievable as it may sound, if you're unfamiliar with CPAN--and it's probably the only language that has more/better library coverage than Java). The moment Parrot becomes a viable target for production languages the folks working on Jython, JRuby, Groovy, etc. are going to at least take a look at it. And CPAN is going to lure some of them over. Not only is the library broader and more diverse, it is also already designed to work with a dynamic OO+functional hybrid language. Perl idioms are far closer to Python and Ruby idioms than Java idioms, and so CPAN libraries will feel far more comfortable and "native" to folks working with those languages than tying to Java libraries ever will--no matter how hard the language designer tries to hide the differences.
And, of course, Perl 6 has a lot of nice features, and the installed base of Perl code is larger than Python and Ruby combined (though smaller than PHP), and perhaps surprisingly, still growing at a rate of more lines of code per year than either. (That said, I suspect Python will catch up eventually, if the trend doesn't reverse, as its rate of growth is higher.)
Just to clarify: I meant a few years too late to be able to take off on a larger scale (larger scale == to be at least as popular as Perl5 used to be). Or in yet other words, the question remains if it will be as popular as Ruby or Python, which I think are its main competitors.
If it were as popular as Perl5 still is, it would be more popular than Python or Ruby. One has to be careful about how much the hype surrounding a language effects your view of its actual popularity.
But, you're right that a lot of new companies and projects are being started on Python and Ruby that would have used Perl five years ago. The two languages are also having more luck at stealing Java developers than Perl ever was.
