Perl is certainly not dying.

Granted - several other dynamic languages have sprung up in its wake, but I don't see Perl suffering for it.

A wise man once said "Perl makes easy things easy, and hard things possible." Perl is easy to learn, and it is possible (and often easy) to do incredibly powerful things with Perl. Some characteristics that make Perl easy to learn can have the negative consequence of allowing novice programmers to write poor code. Perl is just a tool. The Community (and strict + warnings) encourages good coding practices.

I think it is mostly myth that the Community encourages bad coding style. Perhaps the "obfus" are mistaken for this?

That said, I have to confess my own straying ways. After 4 years of trying to pull/push/drag the rest of my company over to a LAMP Stack (P is for Perl) codebase, I gave up. We're now doing .NET and I have to admit it's pretty nice. I know that when Perl6 is released I will be applying much of what I have learned from C# (delegates, static typing, etc) and the head-start will help me write better Perl6.

One problem I see with .NET is "There is ONE way to do it" compared with Perl's "There's More Than One Way To Do It!". The ONE way appears easier for the rest of the developers here, but perhaps because they come from a VBScript background ("There's NO way to do it!!") and wouldn't know a closure, anonymous sub or regex if it bit them on the behind.

I still write plenty of Perl on my own, but for these yahoos .NET is ok. I get more expressiveness with C# than with VBScript, and they can just point-n-click their way through stuff without learning how to code.

I enjoy coding and getting things done, therefore I use and prefer Perl. If I were intimidated by code, or was disconnected from consequences of failure or deadlines, I might prefer some other more corporate language (not naming names).