When is something dead? On paper COBOL and it's descendants are dead, no one in their right mind would use them, yet millions of lines of COBOL are in use today and people are paid a lot to look after them. By that observation COBOL isn't dead.

Perl isn't dead. It's doing a perfectly good job doing what it was designed for, that is scripting, holding things together, rapid prototyping and text manipulation. It's brief glory as the only usable web language is over, but that's not to say it's still not popular.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Perl5 has taken a lot of good ideas from Perl6 and backported them, that doesn't sound like a dead language to me. Perl6 is making impressive progress for an unfunded language, it's drawing good ideas from Python, Ruby and Haskell.

Perl isn't dead, it's just not popular with script kiddies any more.

--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam