Funny thing is, if you read Re: The future of Perl? (The why, and my take.), you'll see I was agreeing with you.

A rare occurrence I know, but you really should read what is written rather than just reacting to who is speaking.

As for your 'point' in this post, it really is garbage. Of all the lines of code written in the last 10 years, I doubt more than 10% -- and would guesstimate <5% -- has been written to add to or replace code existing prior to that period.

I would estimate that the code that makes up the 2 million smartphone apps -- all of which have been written (and simply could not have existed prior to) since 2007 -- make up fully 1/3rd of all the code written. And be they good or bad; not a single line of it was in Perl or COBOL. And nothing that exists inside Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Baidu, Alibaba, ... nor any of the other huge companies that came into existence in the last 15 years, could have existed before 15 years ago. And much of that will have been rewritten several times in the last 10 as the companies grew and had to change to completely new technologies in order to scale out.

Unlike the code of yore, the projected life of new projects, now and over the last 10 years and more, has been measured in years, not decades. And that life expectancy is shortening, not lengthening. Like most everything else in your knowledge-base, you're basing your stance upon the experiences of your youth; which is 30 years and 3 generations out of date.

And whilst maybe 2% - 3% of the entire code in use around the world might be written in Perl; that is unlikely to grow much in real terms and will steadily and inexorably decline in percentage terms over the next 7 years; and again in the next.

There are only so many Perl maintenance jobs around, and their number will decline year on year. They may be enough to keep old farts like you and I in pocket money for a while, but it ain't gonna make the fortunes of anyone in the 20s; nor even keep those in their 40s in a living income for the rest of their careers. There simply isn't enough Perl code installed to warrant anyone taking it up on the basis of a 'steady maintenance gig'.

And there was no 'popularity pole' involved. Neither my post itself -- which was aimed at and mostly only seen by Perl insiders -- consitute same, nor was any mentioned within it.