The only significant thing id like to point out is that Perl is more about cpan and the selfless community of developers and testers that have put it together. I presume as long as those kind of people and perl hackers are around, the innovation would be kept alive for at lest a few more years in the least.
The temporal difficulty with perl is u need to know C well to know the awesome.else u just keep *using* it and writing inefficient code