I usually imagine that Perl will end up in pretty much the same place as COBOL. It will be dead, but it will still be wandering around, eating brains. The aging Perl programmer community will point at the festering, animated corpse and say "Perl is more robust than ever! Look at those maggots wiggling in the eye sockets!" And the rest of the world will make jokes like "No, Perl's not dead; it just smells that way."

I'd like to be wrong.