A non-Perl colleague showed me the link to erikbern.com last week, so it seems to be doing the rounds. I find the analysis method very interesting; it didn't occur to me before seeing that blog post that you could model the situation as a Markov chain.

But the problem with this one, and in fact most other analyses about whether Perl is dead, is the input data. In this case, it's phrase searches on Google. Why only English? Why these phrases? How would you validate whether a page Google offers you is about a genuine software project documenting its transition from language X to Y, or just some dude in Wyoming who blogs about how he heard Scheme is so much better than Java? And so on! Although the analysis is interesting, I can't help but think garbage in, garbage out.

I was reading through my Perl Monks backlog a couple of weeks ago (having been away for a few years), and similar discussions have popped up regularly. I think it was BrowserUK who pointed out that the question is all about perceptions (but I should try to find the node and link to it). Indeed, without some serious statistical effort and funding, it's very hard to frame the question as anything but perceptions about a given programming language. Do perceptions matter? Of course they do, but you can't claim nobody uses a programming language anymore just because few people talk about it anymore.

Personally, I expect Python to suffer Perl's fate in the next decade. Go might take the mantle.