"widely recogni(z)ed" ?

By whom? By Tim Bunce, whose two 5 and 4 year old articles you care to cite? Look at the long term trend. Look at

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIOBE_index (is a popularity index)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measuring_programming_language_popularity

I'm not saying TIOBE is great/right. I'm saying the "world out there" thinks it is valid. Therefore I'm saying you are wrong.

Look at who's citing TIOBE to make a point. Want to re-educate the world? Good luck.

• http://aatul.me/tag/tiobe-programming-community-index/
• http://pixelstech.net/article/1336803507_TIOBE_%3A_Where_is_that_next_big_programming_language_
• http://www.eweek.com/developer/objective-c-repeats-as-tiobe-index-top-programming-language-in-2012/

I could go on almost indefinitely, but I have already won the "I can post more links than you"-contest. And all this because of what? Because you are ashamed to shout out you are using Perl? Because we cannot simply state on our CPAN, on Perlmonks (we have hereby already - good), on Foswiki/TWiki/... pages something like "built with the cool Perl programming language"?

Don't like TIOBE? Ok. Try this - shows an equally bad situation for Perl. And you know what? It perfectly correlates with the TIOBE:

• https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/pypl/PyPL-PopularitY-of-Programming-Language
• http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en#q=%22Perl%20tutorial%22

Yeah. Sure. All "them is wrong". But we have a community whereas Python has not (I really heard this on the last YAPC and the last 2 Perl workshops. Perhaps you would like to search for "foo community" instead of "foo programming"? You know what? Even THAT correlates.