Perl is far from dead. All web pages on Amazon.com are perl... del.icio.us, BBC, Slashdot... but more important is it's non-web use in engineering, finance, and bioinformatics... love Catalyst!
Well, he's right. We are a perl shop, we have tens of thousands of lines of <i>maintainable</i> code, we love the language, but we are almost ashamed to say it.<p>I think the perl community did contribute to this with all the dithering about perl6. Perl6 sucked a lot of perl brains out of the language and what was the higherst profile outcome? Parrot running Python. Hurrah.