I've seen a lot of talk about Perl being a dead programming language and it's better to learn one of the other scripting languages?

You'll find other posts on this site quoting the adage "Right tool for the job."

I've been using Perl since around 1989 or so and I will continue to do so as long as I am still writing code and/or Perl is still as widely available as it is today already installed on most *nix OS-es. What I really like about Perl is it actually fulfills Java's promise of "write once run anywhere" with some caveats. If you use CPAN modules in your scripts it might now work in some places which has bitten me more than once.

Speaking of CPAN, there's another reason I don't see Perl going away anytime soon. There's lots of folks writing modules for Perl and uploading them to PAUSE to be shared out via CPAN. As long as that continues Perl ain't going away anytime soon.

To my point of right tool for the job I would point out that writing a text manipulation program in quite a few languages such as C, C++, Java, Assembler, Visual Basic and a lot of other languages is nowhere as easy as it is in Perl. I'd also hate to be limited to those languages for any sort of automation.

At the same time I'd hate to write a compiler or assembler without using lex and yacc (or the OSS twins of those) along with C.

I'll continue to preach this gospel: "Right Tool For The Job!" (RTFTJ)