in 1998 I hadn't hardly coded since I had a TRaSh80. I saw some cool JavaScript and thought I'd pick it up for fun. It was baffling so I set it aside. I started with Perl a few months later. Last year, on a lark, I hit JavaScript again. It was a matter of a month before I'd surpassed all the JavaScript "gurus" in the office because they were all designers not programmers. I've never done anything serious with Ruby but I threw together a few little scripts on a lark one day. Didn't take more than an hour to get going with it. Same with Java.

Moral: it doesn't matter if Perl has a future or not. Programming does and Perl's quirky ability to emulate the coding style of many languages makes it an excellent tool in the shed not just because you know Perl but because you're half-way or more to knowing a dozen other languages. I know it was easier for me to throw together a couple Java classes than it is for the average Java hacker to do the same in Perl. Maybe not an endorsement for Perl exactly but you get the idea.