You don't have to be worried. There are probably already better languages than perl. What makes perl a really good option is the community, which includes the great help you can get on perlmonks (or news or irc) and also the lots of existing code on CPAN and elsewhere. Such a quantity of existing code cannot easily get grown again, and such a great community won't be assembled any time soon. However, if that happens, you can put perl aside happily, as the new language will be a better alternative and you won't be missing perl at all.