I dont think Perl is threatened by anything, but I do see lots of developer jobs switching to .NET programmers

Microsoft is increasingly doing 'technology partnership' programs with large fortune500/blue chip type companies that don't really make much sense to me. In exchange for cheaper site licenses, hardware discounts, etc, management agrees to go 'Only MS' -- and phases out most custom internal stuff, web and email to .NET. Its one of those really bad management decisions that a CTO or director or IT who has never used a computer but has two MBAs makes. In any event, from what I've seen in the office's of my firm's clients who are partners, they 'phase out' all the perl/c/java programmers (mostly comp-sci degree holders), and 'phase in' MS certified developers (mostly high school graduates who went to DeVry Technical School for 6 months). My company offers a 'clean up' service to fix all the messes these new codemonkeys make.

Anyways, as I see more and more of 'Corporate America' make increasingly bad IT decisions like that, I worry about the other languages. (although I feel good when i think of WallStreet -- which runs almost entirely on Perl and Java)

Perl has, and always will be, the reigning text processing language. More than anything, I think this is because of the way RegEx is handled in perl. Its intuitive and simple -- any other language that uses PCRE gets the job done, but not as easily.

PHP is great for small-midsize web development. Non-programmers can pick it up fast. Seasoned programmers can pick it up faster. It has a history though of security issues from version to version. Its also really bad for non-web stuff -- its not limited to web development, but you should really limit use of it TO web development. Die-hard php fans will show you all the "great stuff" they make with php for commandline or GUI execution.

I don't think perl is any more "stricter" than php in terms of style, conventions, or coding practice -- they both allow for code that is awful to read, write, or execute. Its the nature of a language. PHP just makes it a whole lot easier.

I use Perl for all my web templating, text processing, and large web applications (because I like mod_perl). I can write and run code fast enough for those applications.

I use php for all my simple web apps -- quick input forms/mailer scripts, client login/authorization galleries, messageboards etc -- the development for that is really fast, and directories of files pretty much "drag and drop" with little or no configuration.

If I could choose what language to work in all the time though, I'd actually choose python. Its really fast to code, incredibly easy to read, and can let me accomplish 100lines of perl code in 20lines of python for some projects (and 100lines of python code for 20lines of perl on others). I don't like text-processing with python though, and it doesn't work well in apache (scripts have a significantly longer startup than perl, and mod_python is complex). The Twisted python library has a lot of amazing web and protocol services, but is based on the premise of writing an applicaiton server (so your script binds to a port as a webserver (or whatever server)) -- which is just overkill a lot of times.

Anyways, the point i'm trying to make, is that I think that perlmoks are smart enough to know that people should use 'the right tool for the right job'. Sometimes the job dictates the tool, other times the user dictates the tool. Giving up on a language or using it just because its in/out of fashion isn't really doesn['t work though.