Yeah, yeah, the "i see dead people Perl" is very popular. Mostly from people who learned ONE programming language at school/university and declare everything else obsolete.

Fancy thing is, most Perl programs usually run out-of-sight, out-of-mind. So people stop thinking about it. I bet you that most of the Fortune500 companies depend on one or another critical business process on some Perl script that is maintained by some guy/gal sitting around in IT and having a lot of fun.

Let's consider an example i know well (which is me, frankly). I'm the lone Perl coder in a major automotive company (Frankly, a it's little bit to small for a Fortune500, though). Even ignoring that big, business critical intranet webtool, there are a lot of small, low-maintenance tools that are actually quite relevant to the company. Lets pick one at random:

Our office printers have a pay per page model, meaning every printed page gets charged to the cost unit of the user who printed it. The central printer server monthly generates a list of all printed pages (summarized per user). Of course, my company beeing a SAP customer, we're unable to directly import said file into our accounting system. So, there's this compiled-to-windows-exe Perl script that converts the file and adds some static fields to make our accounting software happy.

The script is something on the order of 100 lines, took less than an hour to develop and has in the last years required something on the order of 15 minutes maintenance. Take that Java/Python/C/C++ developers!