I was positively surprised by the response of the perl community. It wasn’t the typical “our programs run fast” (to ruby fanboys*) or “space as syntax wtf?” (to python fanboys). Instead it seemed that community took notice of the criticisms and made pretty clear that waiting for Perl 6 was not an option. Today, Perl 6 is doing fine (you can write code in Perl 6) and so is Perl 5.