" Most old-school systems and network people not only know how to code their way out of a paper bag, but typically grew up with C and Perl as their two go-to languages."
Which is probably why the "new school" systems programmers (many of whom also know how to program their way out of all kinds of bags) choose other scripting languages to go with C. They don't need to know perl any longer for all the tasks you laid out. Which is probably a good thing. The less dependence internet infrastructure has on specific languages the better.
As you correctly said "Perl holds the Internet together for http://redstate.com/historical reasons, " just as COBOL was the primary "business systems" language for a long time for historical reasons.
As someone pointed out above, when people talk about languages "going away" they don't mean that no one works on the language anymore, just that there are better alternatives these days.
Every time someone uses another language for what someone 10 years ago would have needed COBOL for, it fades a little, till there is only legacy codebases and its caretakers keeping the language alive.
I don't think it is that bad for Perl yet, but the trend seems to be in that direction, with more and more people using Python, Ruby (and even PHP) for the tasks Perl would have been the default choice historically.
Trends are funny, and don't only go in one direction. According to the admittedly flawed TIOBE index (see http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... for verification), in the last year PHP, Python, and Ruby have all fallen, while Perl has increased.
Yeah, not what I would expect either. But Perl isn't as dead as people claim.
many of the "old school" also knew their way out of all kinds of bag and choose perl. Nobody needs to know (pick your language) but knowing perl has really helped me out in my long career in programming. You seem to be of the kind that does not like perl so are looking for the future where no one uses it .
If you think COBOL is only used in legacy code bases, every time you search for a hotel or Air tickets you are most probably interacting with a main frame system
Which is probably why the "new school" systems programmers (many of whom also know how to program their way out of all kinds of bags) choose other scripting languages to go with C. They don't need to know perl any longer for all the tasks you laid out. Which is probably a good thing. The less dependence internet infrastructure has on specific languages the better.
As you correctly said "Perl holds the Internet together for http://redstate.com/historical reasons, " just as COBOL was the primary "business systems" language for a long time for historical reasons.
As someone pointed out above, when people talk about languages "going away" they don't mean that no one works on the language anymore, just that there are better alternatives these days.
Every time someone uses another language for what someone 10 years ago would have needed COBOL for, it fades a little, till there is only legacy codebases and its caretakers keeping the language alive.
I don't think it is that bad for Perl yet, but the trend seems to be in that direction, with more and more people using Python, Ruby (and even PHP) for the tasks Perl would have been the default choice historically.