I never trust anyone who uses the designation "scripting language" let alone those who use it with a capital 'S '. There is absolutely no formal definition of

I never trust anyone who uses the designation "scripting language" let alone those who use it with a capital 'S '. There is absolutely no formal definition of this and it's been repeatedly picked apart such that I don't even have to do it here. Regarding your other comments they seem to be way off base and just using your personal bubble/ "what I've seen over time". Ruby and Python have crushed Perl in modern web development (Twitter and Reddit come to mind among many others). Python has vast user communities in research and science (including computer science teaching now, MIT, Stanford). Perl might be before Ruby in the pack behind R/Matlab/Mathmatica/Python in some research settings, but that's not saying much. Python additionally is the chosen admin utility language of Red Hat and Ubuntu for their Linux distributions, so it seems there are real alternatives to Perl. I'm not saying Perl is bad, I am just saying objectively it's been in decline since the 1990s against its rising competitors in all areas: universities, other research, Linux systems administration, application development and web development.