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Dude, Perl has been in Cobol mode for at least 3 years. And there is an entirely reasonable alternative to Perl in nearly every venue that Perl has been used - Python. Unlike Perl, Python is a language that is still alive and vibrant.

Perl is dead - in the sense that dead means no new adoption for green field projects or programming task. If you earn your daily bread by coding Perl, you really need to upgrade your skill set. Don't put it off.

I think that was the original posters point with Perl, i.e. it has been dying for years now. Maybe it's gone too far to save, only time will tell. However, in places I have worked that used Perl it was as an alternative to shell scripting as it was the only thing you could almost guarantee was on vanilla Unix box, this may keep it going for a while yet. Perl 6 is needed to even give it even a (very) small hope of recovery.

You cant say "cobol mode" and "If you earn your daily bread by coding Perl, you really need to upgrade your skill set. Don't put it off." in the same post. COBOL is still alive, and will be for at least another generation due to the humongous amount of code written with it. If you truly believe Perl is dying, then you could make a killing by maintaining current Perl code.

Rewrites are expensive.

Perl is dying we need Perl 6 now now this January not next January it will be to late.

Funny, I just read an old post from late 2006 where the author said "we need Perl 6 now, not in 2008, or 2009, or 2010, but now".