"perl ...has gone down"
"If Perl is not dead..."

First, and foremost, if you want a career as a programmer, learn to be a lot more precise than the first phase and to be wary of the second unless you can actually see the coroner.

On the matter of precise thought and expresssion: "has gone down" in what respect, from what, to what, by whose judgement (and what was the data upon which that judgement was made)? As it stands, without citation of a presumably trustworthy source (many in the popular press and perhaps even most in the internet are NOT!) and data to back the claim, I would rate its value at slightly below the value of the weeds in my garden; the pests in my pastureland; or the bugs in my code.

By some measures (job ads, for example), Perl may rank lower than at some time in the past... but that's erratically variable and dependent (among other things) on accurate evaluation of the language in the ads.

Then, there's your mention of "python." Here's an unsourced, unsupported observation: there seems to me to be an increasing inclination in some places to deprecate Python. (Aside: I did notice that Google notes that the "official" Python site offers "Download - ‎Python 3.4.2 - ‎Documentation - ‎Python 2.7.9." Scary? Maybe it should be to someone considering staking their future on a language whose docs don't keep up with it's current version... but that's probably just a glitch in the websites SEA or a burp in Google's analysis. But the earlier observation that Perl 6 is unlikely to convert a majority of Snake Charmers seems likely to be correct for many years yet.)

And then there's Java. It's hot... and managers love to be associated with current popular memes (fads, etc)...but you can't count on a cutting-edge, high prestige and high-pay career in java from now thru retirement age. As with Cobol, Fortran and other languages, there will likely be jobs there (and in Perl 5 and maybe Python) because there's so much legacy code in use in production.

So one answer would be: "learn'em all." That's not even an absurd answer. By and large, new languages get easier to learn the more you already know. And it tends to make you more employeable, because even employers who are most devout ___[fill in a language]____ adherents tend to use multiple languages in reality.