Some recent trends away from Perl are due to cleanliness of the language (well, I don't get this -- I love Perl -- but anyway).... I predict the Python and Ruby hype machine to be well countered by Perl6, though --- if Perl6 can get out fast enough Python and Ruby will never attain "peer" status.

I'm gonna risk the downvotes here.

While Perl 6 will clean up some of the ugliness of Perl's syntax (no more @{$array_ref} stuff, etc.). It seems to me that they are adding alot of new operators, and in particular Unicode operators ( see Peir's summary about this here ). Maybe when the dust settles this will be a good thing, and clarity will reign supreme. But I am very wary of languages with weird character sets, I mean if this was a good thing, we would all be programming in APL.

Now I love Perl as much as the next monk, but I also realize why other people don't like it. And I see too that when it comes to clarity of code, Python is really really nice. They don't call it "executable pseudo-code" for nothing. But you can't do the same 3-weeks-worth-of-work-in-one-line scripts you can do in Perl in Python, its just not that "expressive".

Don't be worried about Perl's future. I'd be worried if you were a fan of Forth or Pascal or Cobol. Perl?

Pascal, maybe, but I would hesitate to call COBOL dead. Yeah it sucks as a language, and I highly doubt that there are any new COBOL projects in the works, but there is ALOT of existing COBOL code out there, and that code needs to be maintained. Just look at the work on COBOL.NET (by Fugitsu) to see that its not dead (old, crochety and with a severe case of senility maybe, but not dead).

As for FORTH, its certainly not a widely used langauge, but its also not dead. You would be hard pressed to find another language that can fit into some of the places where FORTH can, its tiny and endlessly extensible. It tiny footprint and fast execution speed make it ideal for small embedded microproccessors with limited memory, you can't say that about Perl/Python/Ruby/etc. Weird, but not dead, its a niche language thats all.

Perl is still alive and well for sure, and PHP (IMO) is just an ugly stepchild of Perl. But PHP is a niche language like FORTH, its ideally suited to small to medium-scale web applications. Perl on the other hand is more of a "general purpose" programming language. PHP may edge it out of the "slap-a-quick-web-site-together" market one day, but who cares, there is still alot of other places Perl lives and works in that PHP will likely never go.

Perl is Dead! Long Live Perl!