Perhaps I'm just in a pessimistic mood, but what makes you think we Perl use is growing, and not shrinking?

I'm not sure what that indicates about how much people are using vs how people are using. Perhaps there's an increase in lone hackers (more apt to upload modules) and a larger decrease in coporate use (less apt to).

Perhaps, as I said, I'm simply pessimistic. Looking for jobs (even for other people) does that to me.

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Feel free to branch out, just keep Perl in the toolbox and bring it out to get the heavy lifting done wherever you go. That's how Perl has always subsisted — even Microsoft rely heavily on Perl “in this day and age,” whether their marketroids would admit to it or not. Perl isn't very visible, but it's very present.

Makeshifts last the longest.

I agree with Aristotle. My current job description makes no mention of Perl but I use it extensively to get real work done. Most of the time my employer does not know what tool I've used to do something that was formerly difficult or impossible.

In today's marketplace I don't think Perl will get you hired as much as keep you employed (assuming you know how to use it appropriately).

That's my experience, too.

With my employer, the nice, shiny frontends are concocted either in Java, VB or PHP.
The backends -- bulky scripts "interconnecting" data-streams -- are written in perl. Confessed, they are sprinkled with some tasty C.

Since December, 2004, PHP-development is stopped and the "web-applications" -- I hate that word -- are to be re-written in perl. Even our VB-programmer want to have a tutorial in perl

perl may or may not be an advantage in a resume, but down there in the machine room, with crying users, clueless PHBs and grumbling customers at the phone, there it is the kind of heavy gear you like to have around.