Additional Point(s):

I came back to this page after reading the answers to the question I had posted earlier about learning perl. In a matter of minutes, so many folks responded with their helpful suggestions!!. This matters. It might not matter to the folks here who are full time programmers and are by far much more knowledgeable than I could ever be. Because I've never been "hooted off" here. It does matter. This community is really truly helpful and when a programming language has such a helpful community around, it just has to have a future. Because it deserves it.

To me, Perl is to scripting what Vim is to text editing. It's got the power of a surgical scalpel. And that's just one of the blades of this amazing swiss army knife of a language. I also think that as long as there is a need for a powerful language that can slice and dice text and has amazing modules for everything, Perl will be around.

It's also the "advertising" factor that counts. While Fabric (a python module for SSH connectivity and such) is so passionately spoken about, Net::SSH2 and the ilk get no love. I really don't get it. They both do allmost the same thing. Still, Fabric is thought of as being "this amazing thing" whereas Net::SSH2 is not.

Boy, I wrote too much in there.