Death of Perl?

Given the news about Ruby and YARV, the Ruby community and the language’s vitality stand in stark contrast to some of the news surrounding the Perl community. If you take a look at O’Reilly’s graphic of relative programming language book sales, you’ll notice that Perl stands ahead of Python and Ruby (even .NET). So given the latest developments with Dan Sugalski, and the relatively long release time of Perl 6, I’m curious as to whether Perl developers will flock Ruby’s way. If you take a look at the trends that O'Reilly mentions, he notes that a few years ago the Python book market was 1/6 that of Perl. Now it’s 2/3. So there’s an obvious shift from Perl to Python. The question is: Why? Ruby would seem to be a better fit.

Obviously it would be a loss for scripting languages if all they can manage to do is to cannibalize market- and mind-share from one another. The real question and trend to look out for is the move from Java, C, C++ or C#. I don’t think that move will come all too quickly. Perhaps Visual Basic though…

Maybe, I’m overstating Perl’s demise anyhow. They did just release Parrot 0.2.2, and there’s a Perl 6 implementation underway in Haskell.