I'm constantly making new acquaintances and since I'm living in a high-tech area also many IT folks.

I'm regularly getting almost hysteric reactions like

"What, you are doing P E R L !?! Are you kidding me?"

The worst story was a guy who was doing JAVA- project management claiming that he knows how to program Perl from 10 years ago and would never do this mess again. BUT - he added - he loves bash, since he can do in a few lines what needs many pages in Java!

WTF? (Perl has certainly an image problem if people think bash is better)

You can't argue with these guys because they don't wanna admit that they have no big idea what dynamic scripting really means.

There are many reasons which led to this situation, and I agree it's often really frustrating.

And looking for interesting Perl projects as a freelancer is becoming more and more difficult.

OTOH the agencies tell me they have problems finding (or defining) good Perl people.

Either the candidates have some knowledge and ridicule Perl or they "fanatically love" Perl and wanna do everything in Perl, which then complicates the situation because you even need more Perl personal. But no folks in between.

The big hope I have is the complete change of JavaScript's image in the last years from an unreliable toy language to a must have.

Regarding Python, I think it's more tolerant for amateur programmers. Even the biggest nonsense looks like well structured code. It's a bit like formatting rubbish with LaTeX makes it look like believable mathematics (as an example take BUK's nonsense paper).

Managers see pretty format and think something (like the famous IBM quote)

"Nobody has ever got fired for using Python!".