[longlistener]

I'm a perl hacker from way back. I put a few things in CPAN back in my day. But honestly I've not written perl in a decade, so when I got a really amazing job offer for a position doing Perl, I gave it some thought.

Perl is not only not the sexiest/hottest language, but watching and waiting for Perl6 and getting the OO model cleaned up is like waiting for "Duke Nukem Forever". So do you really want to ride on that train? Do you think it will look good on your resume, improve your skill set, or help you think in new and better ways? For all practical purposes the language is dead (FINE, a perl6 implementation is out, but still if the growth is that slow it IS all but dead).

I get offers pretty much constantly to do work in Python, Ruby, and even Java. It would take a lot to make me want to backtrack to an environment that wouldn't help me to grow and evolve as a developer. So the answer for me was "No thanks, thats not really what I want to be doing".

[phaylon]

    but watching and waiting for Perl6 and getting the OO 
    model cleaned up

Have a look at http://search.cpan.org/dist/Moose and http://moose.perl.org as well as the MooseX::* namespace on CPAN. It's Perl 5 OO with a Meta Object Protocol, lots of extensions, and compatibility with pure Perl 5 OO.

    Do you think it will look good on your resume, improve 
    your skill set, or help you think in new and better 
    ways?

For me it does. I'm a full-time Perl 5 developer and I have to learn and read up on newer technologies all the time. Even if the CPAN already provides me with what I mostly need, I'll still have to integrate it into the customers infrastructure. And for that I have to understand it.

    For all practical purposes the language is dead

CPAN disagrees.