I know of the perl 6 development. I've not really seen anything else get noticed. Anything noteworthy to mention here?

Oh man, far too much to list in a post.

Just for starters though: perl 5.12 language features, Moose, Plack, perlbrew, Task::Kensho, the Modern Perl and Enlightened Perl movements, the Padre IDE, Strawberry Perl. That's maybe 0.0001% of what's going on.

I don't know about Perls core, but CPAN is a hotbed of new development and has been for years. Just look at the new module stream on twitter:

https://twitter.com/cpan_new

I bet there's a tonne more work going into Perl modules than Ruby gems...

You mentioned Sinatra? On my todo list is to look at Dancer, which seems to have started as a clone of Sinatra.

Edit: I might add that you could describe the situation as that parts of Perl 6 has been "backported" to Perl 5. Moose seems to take over the Perl world, like testing did a decade ago. The fun part is the extensibility of the language.