As a perl5 programmer of 5 years, I've branched out. In terms of professionally this means mostly into Ruby but a little bit Java and the occasional JavaScript.

As a perl5 programmer of 5 years, I've branched out. In terms of professionally this means mostly into Ruby but a little bit Java and the occasional JavaScript. Perl5 is a fine language that is over-attacked, and neat stuff is still done in it. Ruby as a language is better (but more subject to hype and so more often overrated)... and I'm confident that Perl6 is full of neat stuff. I wish it the best. And I will take any of these languages over Java for most problems I've faced. But if you stick with too much Perl for too long you run a serious risk of being typecast as a "Perl guy" familiar only with dated languages, fairly or otherwise, and can expect a hard time finding the sort of jobs you want in the future, which is a pity. (Which isn't to say you won't find jobs, just that the pool of jobs will lean towards "maintain legacy code with no chance to refactor make your time" and "build engineer".) This is why I branched out in the first place. My next target is Elixir (and then by extension, Erlang), narrowly winning out over Scala, with Go/Rust/OCaml trailing behind a little. I reckon Scala is probably more practical, and surprisingly popular in Europe, but I like working with a "reliability" mindset more than not and therefore forecast that I'll like the tools and opportunities in Elixir better. I've barely started but my initial reaction to what I've seen is quite positive. - But at some level, all that's just me, and you shouldn't take lessons from my experience nearly so much as it should prompt you to think about your own experience and what you want out of programming as a hobby or as your career.