Perl is the cobol of year 2040 .

Outside of the la la world where everything is coded perfectly , there is the real world, where a hudge amounts of scripts are written in Perl because it's easy and it's installed by default on many systems.

All these scripts are acumulating, most of them are poorly coded, some of them are crucial to company functions ... I've already seen my fair share of hard encoded IP adresses that change and then "Buisness Unit X345 is not receiving it's files" etc. ...

Granted, this could happen with any other language, but Perl's wide availability made it the tool of choice for such uncontrolled developpements.

Of course those scripts will not be written in a very clean way, to say the less, and some will turn into a maintenance hell ( i know : it's already the case ) .

So under this light, i guess you can say that there's gonna be a lots of job for Perl coders, for quite a long time !!

<rant off>