Why do people keep quoting TIOBE like it means something?
It's also in conjunction with my own experience. There may be more job offerings that mention perl (because of decades of legacy scripts) but in general nearly every job interview we've had or every student working for us didn't know perl. Especially for students: You don't learn Perl (thank god!!) but C, Java, Python, Haskell.
If that were true then you would see quite different results!
Look at sourceforge.net and compare perl and pythons numbers (2700 vs 4200)
Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap) shows Perl & Python with 8905 and 12,149 respectively. Certainly interesting to see that C# has even more opensource projects on there than both Perl & Python with 12,192 :)
Still no good looking at one repo site without comparing with some of the others for a fuller picture. Here are some other figures I just browsed for:
Freshmeat:
* Perl 3898 - http://freshmeat.net/tags/perl
* Python 3526 - http://freshmeat.net/tags/python
* Perl 13%
* Python 9%
Maybe the Perl community just needs to trick Apple into making Perl the default language for iPhone and iPad development. It's marketshare will shoot through the roof overnight.
Perl was overtaken by C# and Python in the last 2 years, for example.
I think it will be around for a lot of years, but in the end.. "it's dying" describes the trend pretty much. Ada, Cobol, etc. are all still used and you can earn quite some money when you know them, but i really wouldn't call them "alive".
A lot of programs and scripts are written in perl, and even new scripts (if i look at my company). But slowly all those handy scripts will be overtaken by the "new" programmers that didn't start with perl but with ruby, python, php and such.
From personal experience: Many employees at my company still use perl, basically because they don't want to learn a new language and started with perl, but all the new employees (like me) avoid it where they can and try to "migrate" the company to other languages. The perl scripts written today will probably be around for the next 5 years, but the next time they'll be in another language.
At least i look forward for those scripts dying, because they regularly give me major headaches when trying to fix scripts written by someone else 2-5 years ago. From all i do (that includes a lot of scripts) touching those perl scripts is easily the most painful thing to do. I've wasted countless hours on those "things" where i should've been productive.