Perl is all but dead because Larry Wall, Perl's developer, thought it'd be a good idea to let someone else implement his spec for Perl 6. There were some attempts, and you can argue about their success, but the fact that there is no reference implementation is what killed Perl. The Perl community argued and thrashed and screamed about Perl 6, and meanwhile, Python and Ruby developed vibrant communities, and most serious Perl programmers I know simply migrated to one of the new, more developed languages.
I suppose what this guy is really saying is that Perl 5 died around the time of the dot-com bust. But correlation does not equal causation; Perl killed itself.
30 seconds of Googling puts this fallacy entirely to bed:
http://perl.la/ http://www.perl.com/pub/2014/02/perl-today-february-2014.htm... http://moose.iinteractive.com/about.html
I don't agree that Perl is all but dead, but I agree that one of the bigger contributors to the length of P6's 15 year gestation is quite plausibly Larry holding his tongue and commits in relation to compiler implementation.
Fwiw:
* According to Larry (a couple weeks ago) the community told him to stay out of compiler implementation at the start of the P6 project. He complied, constraining his P6 toolchain coding to pieces such as the STD grammar/parser.
* Late last year Larry said he planned to change that, with his main focus set to be optimizations. And in the last few weeks he has indeed begun landing a stream of commits to Rakudo and MoarVM. (So far his commits mostly relate to Unicode handling, which looks set to be a notable P6 strength, but there have been some significant optimizations too.)
* There is a de facto reference implementation: Rakudo/MoarVM.
I hate Perl because of its syntax but I have to be thankful to Perl because it made Matz start Ruby.
That said, your statement doesn't compute: What does Perl has to do with the dot-com crash?!