Perl has an amazing amount of social capital. It's used by tons of Fortune-500 companies. Good luck finding a single business on Wall Street that isn't using it. It's huge in the finance industry. The problem is people in the finance industry aren't allowed to talk about what they do, ever. So it doesn't get much press. It's also huge in biotech, but again, biotech doesn't get much front-page action.
Just recently, Booking.com gave over $100k to continue work in Perl. Craigslist gave over $50k for Perl. These are huge companies doing amazingly well, all depending on Perl. And they give like this every single year. Got a few minutes, check out all the companies (including tons of startups) on BuiltInPerl.com.
Perl bad for your Career? Don't tell that to the people at BusinessInsider, who ranked it the highest paying language to learn: http://www.businessinsider.com/9-tech-skills-that-pay-over-1... And they aren't alone. A recent Gartner study says "Current and prospective Perl developers should feel confident that the language will remain a solid technology investment for the foreseeable future."
The truth is Perl is the original QWERTY keyboard. But many people left it a long time ago for some really good reasons, and Perl took too long to fix those issues. Many of the reasons people left have been fixed for years or decades now. But anybody in sales will tell you it takes a lot more effort to fix a bad relationship than it takes to keep people happy. I wish the Perl community had realized that 15 years ago. Now, Perl faces the uphill battle of getting people willing to take a second look.
Fortunately, Perl has a massive community behind it. No other language can rival what the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) offers right now (even the ones that tried to copy it outright). Perl has amazing conferences going on around the world with huge turnouts. Yet, it has an invalid reputation that "Perl is dying." Why? Because Perl's Achilles heel is marketing.
Perl is seriously competitive in every category. It's being used all around the world by huge companies. It has an amazing community of support built around it. Perl developers are in huge demand (check out jobs.perl.org). Want a great job after school? Learn Perl!
But you'll never hear it discussed in a board room. And if you try to bring it up in a non-perl shop, you'll probably run into somebody that thinks "You get no extra points for knowing Perl." Really, the issue that people don't understand is that there are people that write scripts in Perl, and then there are people that write CODE in Perl. Both are great, both are important, but they are both very different. Many scripters don't even know, or need to know, there's a whole other level of Perl coding available. And this all comes down to marketing. Perl has failed to market itself.
So what happens now? Companies that are more interested in picking a tool that does the best job will take a look at Perl, and many will choose it. Companies that are primarily interested in hype probably won't. The Perl community isn't going anywhere. Things will progress and then 10 years from now, there will still be people posting about how in their opinion "perl will slowly die." while the other languages of today are dead and gone.