> proper OO without all that convoluted bless stuff

Moose[1], and more lightweight versions in Mouse[2] and Moo[3], have been around for ages by this point, almost 15 years in some cases. Unfortunately it was never made core (but something like them is supposed to be core in Perl 7), so it was always one of the "best practices" things that you had to be in contact with other people about Perl to know or read some Perl community stuff for, as it wasn't in the official docs.

> good data-science libs like pandas

To my knowledge Perl with PDL[4] was the go-to solution for bioinformatics people for a long time. I never did anything with it or Python's Pandas though, so I don't know how they compare (or more importantly, how they compared back when people actually used Perl for this stuff much).

> easy concurrency

While somewhat wonky, Perl's concurrency has been around in forms for a long time (the Coro[5] library was first released in 2001), if a bit harder to use until recently when like every other language the async/await stuff took over.

The parallelism story has always been pretty good, even if also slightly weird (the ithreads system used forks on Unix to emulate threads, but essentially it's an abstraction you can mostly ignore). Notably, the fact you actually had a threading system[6] with locks and semaphores that worked put it above Python and Ruby in that category.

> ergonomical web-frameworks to beat PHP

This took longer, but Mojolicious[7] seems to fit this category well, easily being used as simple as something like Sinatra to stuff close to Rails (IMO, and without ActiveRecord).

That's not to say Perl is perfect and should have always won out, just that I think the problems Perl experienced (and still experiences, and which recently "Perl 7" is trying to address) are more along the lines of the trade off that was made with regard to backwards compatibility and legacy support, and the effect that had long term on the community.

Perl's absolute adherence to backwards compatibility to the point that 20 year old scripts often run without issue on the latest release of the interpreter was always a boon to those that wanted stability and support. It's still used in some places (for example, where I work) as the primary scripting language for server based utilities that are expected to run in a Unix environment. The problem is that this is a trade-off that hurts more for new users and new technologies as time advances. It's great that our (literally) 20 year old scripts to clean up and do server management still function, but it's not as great that ergonomically Perl requirement to opt-in to many new features (so they don't cause old code with conflicting sub names to fail, as an example) means that there's been an ever increasing list of things you must enable in new Perl lest you deal with annoying old behavior makes it's use for new projects annoying at best. Having a good object system is only the first step, and you're right to call it out because as it was never moved to core, it never got as much use as it could have.

> Sadly it was not to be.

It is sad, because it's a nice language and I love using it most of the time, but I also feel like it wasted well over a decade of what should have been major advances because it was deemed less important than backwards compat and everybody just said "well there's a module for it, that's good enough" when it definitely wasn't sufficient. For chrissakes, Perl only got the most simplistic form of function signatures relatively recently, and what we got is far inferior to what was available and I used as a module a decade ago[8]. Perl's problems were always much deeper than not having some solution or equivalent to some nice tool or way of doing things in other languages. Those came, usually fairly quickly, it was all the other stuff that shed the users to the point that now it's hard to know if there's enough left to drive the change that's needed to keep it alive (in the sense that it's not just in bug maintenance mode).

Sorry for the rant. Obviously I'm sad about the current state of things... I've even mostly decided that I might as well do new projects in other languages, but it makes me sad that it feels like I'm doing so not because they're mostly superior at a level that's hard to compete with but because the Perl community (and this includes myself) couldn't get their shit together long enough to steal the good bits in a way that actually mattered to people looking to try a new language.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moose_(Perl)#Examples

2: https://metacpan.org/pod/Mouse#SYNOPSIS

3: https://metacpan.org/pod/Moo#SYNOPSIS

4: http://pdl.perl.org/

5: https://metacpan.org/pod/Coro#SYNOPSIS

6: https://metacpan.org/pod/threads::shared

7: https://mojolicious.org/

8: Function::Parameters, as in the bottom of this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633961, as the CPAN page does a crap job of showing it with types which is my favorite part.