I started a new Perl project 7 years ago and it has been an ecstatic experience for me. It is basically a text processor and HTML generator, so Perl has all the features I need. I am so happy, and I'm not even using anything beyond 5.010. I'm at 32K+ LOC now, and I'm also using the project to teach programming to Ukrainian kids over Zoom.
Number of breaking changes I have experienced in these 7 years? 0.
Number of times I've had any significant issues setting up a new deployment? 0.
It may not be as popular, but it certainly continues to work well.
Yep. The fact that 100% of the code I've written in Perl since the beginning of this century still works just fine year after year with each new release is an immense bonus. I have deployment scripts written on Debian 3 still running in cron "as is" 20 years later, zero maintenance. Try that with Python, PHP or Ruby...
There's some nice stuff in the new features and everybody has their favourites. Some like the subroutine signatures, but I'm a big fan of the hash slices and postfix dereferencing in v5.20.
Number of breaking changes I have experienced in these 7 years? 0.
Number of times I've had any significant issues setting up a new deployment? 0.
It may not be as popular, but it certainly continues to work well.