A common observation, but I'm not sure how true it is. Python has much more share on things like reddit and on the TIOBE rankings, but it too is dead. Nobody likes Python3 which broke backwards compatibility for Unicode and is significantly slower than 2.x. None of the plans to JIT it have taken off. It doesn't scale. Perl isn't really any better here, but Perl6 is a completely different language than Perl5 that fixes many pain points and if ever successfully optimized might end up being the one scripting language to rule them all ;) (it has a bumpy road though). TLDR: Python has a lot of share, but no real future. It's not dead, but a dead-end (same as Perl5 long-term, but for now it is surprisingly active and well supported). Lots of new projects are done in Perl5 btw. One I'm particularly excited about is TauStation (SciFi text MMORPG).