In 2004, at the 2nd Perl Conference at Budapest I gave a small talk on why I thought Perl - Perl5, that is - is losing its popularity. I would rather not repeat all of my arguments here, but the conclusion was simple: in order to make our beloved language popular once again (or "even more", as you like it :)), the most important thing that we need is the constant (preferably increasing) flow of new programmers. IMHO Perl performs badly when it comes to taking the first few steps.
I think "marketing" for Perl can actually be written using Perl. Think about the utility "mysqldump" bundled with MySQL! Put it this way: until there is MySQL, there will be mysqldump, and there will be Perl - MySQL will see to it, and so will OS packagers.
A few applications are enough to keep a programming language alive. A few more, and it can become popular. The language itself is almost irrelevant. IMHO the success story of PHP lies (mostly) in two things: some applications (e.g. phpmyadmin, phpadsnew, whateverCMS and whateverWIKI, squirrelmail, etc.), and the fact that you only need notepad.exe to create echo "Hello, World!".
After this talk in 2004, I tought: everyone can do talks, but a few have time to do some real programming, so let's do the later! A year later PET was mostly ready. I was lucky that I needed it for my work, and that my company is flexible enough that it has no problem making PET public domain. But hey - what is PET anyway?
PET is a lightweight, standalone application server - think about Tomcat for Java, or ZOPE for Python, for example - and a developement framework in one. It was being developed "silently" for a long time, without making it publicly available, which made me able to change various parts of it without worrying about compatibility with "older releases". However, since the begining phase, it was actually deployed, driving some pretty big websites - including one of (or the) biggest community website for children in Europe, serving millions of hits per day.
A few things that you might like about PET: