Why does Perl 5 need a Rails? Despite the existence of Rails, Perl 5 is still more widely used than Ruby. (Perl 5 and Ruby 1 came out around the same time.)
If you thought that was a joke, you're still missing the point.
I suffer no illusion that their sales numbers have any correlation to the popularity or efficacy of a technology. Their Ruby book sales crashed in 2007, for example.
Who is writing new projects in Perl 5?
I know of many, many new projects written in Perl 5. So far this year I've worked on three and have another later in the year.
