use Perl

I doubt it is much to do with Perl and more to do with the credit crunch.

People, I know, working in IT have felt the full force of the downturn as the first thing businesses cut is any development/consultancy work. Many businesses reason thusly: "it would be nice to have a better system, but the one we've got works fine for the moment, thanks very much."

Less IT means less need for books about IT.

Add to that the fact that it is cheaper and quicker to read the POD/man page/use Google than buy a book about programming and it doesn't take much to see that publishers will have trouble.

Is Moose just a fad? Will it go the way of so many cool ideas in programming?

The answer to this question is important, because if it is a fad, I don't really want to create a dependency on it.

It's object introspection is extremely good, though.