(Shrug ...)   College curriculums evolve along with everything else, trying their best to “keep current.”   However, the gamut of “what people know” is considerably broader than that.   Believe it or not, there are plenty of people out there who, like me, routinely and during the course of every day “shift gears” between all kinds of programming paradigms that are ... and, that are not ... today taught as dogma in universities.   One moment we might be writing OOP, and later on in the same day we might not.   All in a day’s work ... you pick up a wrench, then a screwdriver, then a ...

All that being said, this is not a compelling motive, either for “the death of the Perl language” nor for any sort of dramatic re-purposing of what it is today.   Perl, like all other languages, is a tool.   It’s not a fashion-statement.   It’s not merely something that might be used in some future project:   it’s the implementation language of literally thousands of applications, some many years old now, that are responsible for billions of dollars’ worth of mission-critical work and the jobs that go with them.   (As well as “writing brand-new stuff.”)   As a professional-grade language system, it needs no introduction and no defense.   Therefore, any talk of its “future,” or of its “demise,” truly are moot.   Such things are “academic arguments.”   Meanwhile, Perl is one of the perhaps many languages that people use, all in a day’s work, to pay for their kid’s college educations.   :-D