Think of the history of PHP versus the history of Perl. Perl started as a general purpose scripting tool, which just happened to have characteristics that made it extremely useful in the CGI era of web sites. PHP as far as I know was some kind of Perl wrapper or extension or something that specifically targetted the web domain. So as time went by it got better and better at that niche task (I guess its better anyway). Wheras Perl stuck to the middle ground. And Perls utility in that middle ground has not been eroded. Large systems still are written in Perl, vast amounts of money are still being made on the back of Perl. Just because you dont see it in the web market doesnt mean its not happening.

You also have to realize that PHP has made certain policy decisions that Perl has not. For instance in the PHP world backwards compatibility is not all that important. From what i know every release of PHP results in serious breakage of older code. On the other hand the Perl development team sweats blood trying to avoid breakage. So where PHP can make changes that will break all their old code in the name of progress perl has to be much more careful. We want smooth incremental improvements with minimal breakage, we dont want big leaps that lead to language fragmentation. Scripts written for Perl 5.6 should work more or less the same in Perl 5.10. From what Ive read the same cannot be said of PHP.

This also applies to the site here. It hasnt changed much in the past years. We tinker here and there, make gradual improvements etc, but we are not willing to throw away what we have just to convert to some newfangled web-technology that for all we know will be obsolete in a year or two. What we have works, perhaps not always as well as we would like, but sufficiently well that Perlmonks is still one of the higher quality programming sites on the net.

As someone mentioned, we have half a million posts here, and making major changes to the site would potentially compromise the utility of that store. And thats something we just arent willing to do. We wont sacrifice the past for an uncertain future, instead we will plod along, and still be here when all the PHP sites around now are done and dusted because some new version of PHP has forced them all to be rewritten.