Thanks to XP champion Cop, I found out a thread started back in 2001 by japhy which is actually in the form of a poll but seems to have never made its way to polls. I'm reposting it here with additions from the various replies given in the original thread, some cosmetic interventions and a pair of suggestions of my own.

Perl Programmers Don't Die...

• they get DESTROYed
• their refcount drops to 0
• they get collected
• they just refer to something else
• they just warn
• if they're in an eval
• they croak
• they form a circular self-reference and so continue to exist forever, but become inaccessible
• they shutdown
• they are exported
• if they are blessed
• if they are damned
• they reset $self
• they go out of scope
• they get undefined
• they just leave the symbol table
• they get dumped and hope someone remembers the reverse
• they accidentally get stringified and can't be restored
• they're obfuscated and B::Deparse can't handle it
• someone enables strict and they have to adapt or leave
• they're locals and you move away
• they're deprecated for the next release
• they just fade to Python
• they just hibernate waiting for Perl 6

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