My dad has written COBOL almost exclusively for something close to 30 years, and has made a very pretty penny for doing so. I have read some of his code, and it was a glorious thing, despite the inelegant nature of COBOL itself. Thing is, he doesn't want to learn new languages because he doesn't feel like he needs to. He lacks the Perlis aspect of programming languages. I am learning Perl to both make some money and to make my code in other languages as well. I don't think that Perl is the language to end all others, and I don't think that such a language will ever exist. That having been said, I think a major contributing aspect of why Perl popularity is wounded lately is because of web programming and the dissolving frontier of the delineation of front end and back end systems. Node.js is a great example of the blurred lines we are seeing nowadays. Javascript started out as a simple way to get graphics to jump around on web pages, and now it's powering the crypto in my browser, and the databases in web apps, and who knows what else, right? Well, Perl could just as easily do these things, as could practically any other marketable language, if only the time and effort was spent on it.