There are some big and new projects in Perl out there (BBC iPlayer for one – which is an enormously high-traffic site). The real issue is that a language dies

There are some big and new projects in Perl out there (BBC iPlayer for one – which is an enormously high-traffic site). The real issue is that a language dies when new people stop learning it. Python's the language-du-jour of programming education (and has a strong position in science as a Matlab replacement, thanks to Numpy), Ruby's got Rails to give it momentum, PHP has Wordpress and Drupal as gateway drugs, Clojure and Scala are the JVM's great hopes, F# is the CLR's, and C#, Java and C++ will give you access to a lot of jobs. Where are the new Perl programmers – in bulk – going to come from?