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For purposes that are relevant now (and will be relevant in the future) Perl is already dead.

Right now I'm at a data science/big data conference, and I can tell you that for all its supposed prowess in data processing, Perl has not come up at all in any of the talks, not once. The entire field of machine learning, big data et al. has been invented basically from nothing in the past few years, entire new ecosystems of tools have sprung from nothing, and people has been using these tools to add value to their businesses, to move and transform data at a scale that was unimaginable a decade ago - and Perl is not part of this in any way. There is this huge revolution going on that has left Perl and its community standing behind.

For the Perl community to have any kind of future, this is a compounded problem - because right now an entire new generation of programmers, data scientists (call them what you want) are growing up using these new tools, new methodologies, while Perl is not even in the picture anymore - if you would ask them, they would ask back: that scripting language from the '90s? What about it? And they would be right.

That example about connecting to UPS and coloring the output: that's cute. But if you are a young developer starting now and that's all you know, you might as well take up basket weaving as a Plan B.

Swiss army knives have their uses, but to keep a fleet of aircraft flying (to use a crude analogy) it's not going to cut it.