As for Perl vs Java, judging from recent conversations on boston.pm, PHP is seen as a far more direct threat.

I agree. I code in both. I like both. However for what I do (web/database intergration) PHP is my 1st choice. Perl was the defact language for CGI and dynamic websites. Now PHP (and to some extent ASP) has replaced it. Perl has it's place for a lot of background tasks and for anything too complex for shell scripting.

Java doesn't really compete with Perl (or PHP) in any of these places. I don't understand what all this Java vs. Perl stuff is about.

Different people, different jobs. For what I use Perl for (and have used Perl for for more than a dozen years), PHP is not an option. I don't do webby stuff. If I had to replace the stuff I've written in Perl by stuff written in another language, that other language would be shell, AWK or C. And whatever language I might have learn if I hadn't learned Perl. Python probably. Ruby maybe, but that's quite a newcomer. And had I learned Java, I might have written some of it in Java.

But whether or not "perl is dying", I don't care. Perl exists. Even if no new versions appear, it doesn't cease to exist. And it won't stop doing what it's doing. It won't effect me, nor my job, if everyone else stops programming Perl.

Perl --((8:>*