Perl is dead if you look at it from the viewpoint of how many new people are being taught to use it (not many). However, it's definitely not dead if you look at it from the viewpoint of whether it's still the best language to do a lot of things. Specifically, data parsing, administration tasks, that sort of thing. Perl allows you to cram a lot of code into a very small space, and there are modules available for just about everything (if you can figure out how to get them installed) as well as a fairly lively user base here. I do prefer PHP for web site front ends, but I use Perl a lot for back end automated tasks, one-offs, etc.