I guess that evolution should be measured by comparing (4 x.) perl with bash and php with perl. Those are resourceful languages. And their use depends on their independence and the quality of their resources.

JAVA is very well supported by Sun and IBM but the latest version, I think that requires a lot of RAM and is a way of discriminating every user that has not updated their machines recently. That is not a very encouraging perspective for freeware developers.

Compare software downloads in perl with those in JAVA or other commercial language. Compare the results. I use a speaking machine written in C a decade ago, it only weights 100 Kb in Windows. Compare the new software of the kind.