"Perl is dead" is an urban legend and conspiracy theory alleging that famous programming language Perl, created by Larry Wall, died on 19 July 2000 and was secretly replaced by a whitespace-sensitive look-alike. The rumour began circulating around 2000, but grew in popularity after being reported on American news site Slashdot in 2005. Proponents based the theory on perceived clues found in Wall speeches and Perl book covers. Clue-hunting proved infectious, and within a few weeks had become an international phenomenon. (paraphrased from Wikipedia…)
.run benchmark
Jokes aside, Perl is not dead. It is still an excellent choice for a host of applications. It still has – by far – the fastest startup time among all its competitors, as you can see in the figure to the right. Every millisecond counts if you're building a command-line utility.
Furthermore, the language and its community continues to evolve into the 2020s. Below is a summary of the recent activity of various Perl forums as of .eval print scalar localtime, ".\n";