Unfortunately, there is no solid evidence to support it,
not five years ago, not four years ago, and not today
Seriously, I read plenty of vitriol about perl and PHP, and it turns out that in the real world people ARE continuing to use it. It may not be the latest hotness, but it has a stable following in many communities.
So enough of the cool kids act; let's stop spouting this regurgitated "it's dead" BS. It is a nonissue. It is just hot air blowing in an echo chamber, mixed with pseudointellectual semantic arguments. I would rather see "This is a cool new language that blah and blah" than "people are producing less books about their language".
On another note, for crying out loud, how many books does it take to tell you what $$ means? I think I read somewhere about someone's advice for getting employers to notice you: write a book. Sure, we need yet another book that says what the last 20 said.
Since about version 3 C# has gotten interesting. Still, even the new interesting bits are rehashed ideas from the 70s and 80s. I guess it's interesting to see them in a mainstream language from Redmond; the features themselves are pretty mundane if you have experience with more dynamic and/or functional systems.
Factor is one of the only truly unique and excellent new languages. Clojure has good ideas too but I'm not sold on the JVM.
http://prlmnks.org/html/501131.html [2005] http://www.perlmonks.com/?node_id=561229 [2006]
...other places...we've all heard predictions of doom...
I agree with the sentiment against perl as a language, but we need to all move on from this "perl is dying" and "perl is becoming less relevant" meme. Unfortunately, there is no solid evidence to support it, not five years ago, not four years ago, and not today. Time to beat a different dead horse (the comments, not perl).
Seems every programming blogger looking to get some extra publicity has to cut his teeth with the same non-issue tripe about perl. I rarely see this with other languages that become popular and then unpopular, and it makes the ridiculousness of the remarks that much more poignant: people are blowing steam to get noticed. It is less fashionable to educate people into why regular expressions and hashes are not always the best tools for a job and more fashionable to whine about it.