[thumper]

Language is a tool. Certainly, some people will create literature and others are merely hacks. Some languages will be conceptually cleaner, some more pure, and some an amalgam of expressions "borrowed" from other languages.

No, Virginia, Perl is not dead. Not as long as there is more than one way to do it, or a hacker trying to finish something that was due yesterday.

Perl, as we know it, might pass from this earth. But the spirit it embodied, that first we should use duct tape to build on the work of others then write glue to make it stick, that getting-things-done was the primary goal --- this is too close to the core of our restless selves. A thousand years from now, there will be some startup somewhere with an urgent need and a hacker that strokes his chin and says, "I think I could write that in Perl[1]..."

[1] replace "perl" with your favorite language. Pick the right tool for the job. Sometimes means "the tool you are most familiar with", but that says more about you than about the language.