The real problem with these kinds of posts is the equivocation in the word "dead". People wanting to defend languages (also APL lately) want to implicitly use

The real problem with these kinds of posts is the equivocation in the word "dead". People wanting to defend languages (also APL lately) want to implicitly use a definition something like "0 people are using it and no work is being done in it", but by that standard you can't ever declare anything dead. That doesn't make the definition "wrong" but it does make it not useful. The purpose of a definition is to split the relevant set of possibly values into at least two non-empty sets. Other people are looking at the first and second derivatives of how many people are using it, how popular it is now compared to its height (in the programming language world it's already a problem if your "height" of usage isn't right now), and the likelihood of it ever coming back. From that point of view, Perl 5 is, if not dead, certainly very close. To me, most tellingly, Perl 5 has no plausible path that I've heard for acquiring some unique value proposition that can give it a new lease on life. As I said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26567151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26567151 , in a lot of ways Perl's biggest problem right now is that it won. It convinced people that its way was good, and as a result, Perl's previous value proposition has been incorporated wide and far in other languages. The only time I pick up Perl now is when I have the need for a seriously heavy-duty string munging task that fits into about 200 lines, and I get huge wins from the RE syntax in Perl. And by time-of-use, Perl is probably my "best" language, the one I've used for more clock time than any other. Even so, that's where I am in 2021. I would encourage the community to either decide that it's OK just continuing on as it is, or decide that it wants to try to find that new unique value proposition that will give it some sort of unique value in 2023 or 2024. But there isn't an option where Perl continues along as it is and it experiences some sort of burst in growth. You have to pick one, you can't get the advantages of both.