…then Perl is probably in the top 5 in use.

I agree with this guess. I see many job ads that list Perl in the small print after the headliners Java, C, SQL, Sysadmin, QA, Python, etc. Jobs that headline Perl are rarely followed but much else besides PHP or the occasional big data or VOIP package.

And to comment on the overall thread a bit more seriously than I did initially: Perl is doing better today reputation-wise than it was in 2005–2010 by my anecdotal experiences and the problem never had anything at all to do with Perl 6 as I have heard it. Also: MOP may come to the core, Perl 5 is faster, less buggy, and better with Unicode than all the high level interpreted languages, and depending on how you see a thing Perl has the best OO and the richest web and ORM frameworks. PSGI has normalized, unified, and revived the language that stormed the early web. These are things that keep languages alive. PHP sure isn’t surviving on its great reputation. I work primarily in Perl and have had two “greenfield” projects with it in the last five years (and JS of course being web stuff) at a Fortune 20 company. So :P