I usually imagine that Perl will end up in pretty much the same place as COBOL. It will be dead, but it will still be wandering around, eating brains. The aging Perl programmer community will point at the festering, animated corpse and say "Perl is more robust than ever! Look at those maggots wiggling in the eye sockets!" And the rest of the world will make jokes like "No, Perl's not dead; it just smells that way."
I'd like you to be wrong, too. Any ideas for helping Perl avoid a fate that requires Perl developers to be dispatched by removing the head or destroying the brain?
IMHO you are not wrong.
Never-the-less Perl will stay as hard link between procedural and oop.
And of course the one-liners, more or less synonyms for UNIX administration.