Oh God, where would I be without CPAN? Perl is a beautiful language. I'm not a programmer by profession and I only code websites in Perl for fun. I have tried to do the programming thing before, but none of them ever made sense to me and it felt so forced. But for some reason Perl was very intuitive for me.

I think people believe Perl is dead because it is very old. People think that all languages must eventually die simply because of age. I think these people are the young programmers who want to be edgy and cool with their Python and Ruby. I also believe that this is the fault of the Perl community, and I'm not saying that necessarily as a bad thing! The Perl community doesn't like to make a big fuzz and stroke their own ego (as far as programming languages go). To add to that, Perl doesn't hold a large share of programming newbies. Wherever programming newbies go, all the fuzz goes. Like PHP. It's all the rage with beginner web programmers, so obviously it's a pretty big deal beyond the sphere of professional programmers.

I think people will look at Ruby and read its description and say, oh hey, this like a modern improved version of Perl! Who'd bother with Perl if they read something like that? (I meant by the way Ruby markets itself as having implemented that best features of Perl and other languages)