I thought this was a great article. Thinking about Perl's own life and future I think that predicting the future is difficult but Perl will be around for a little (I'm gonna say at least 20 years) while for three reasons that I can think of:

CPAN: Mr. Graham talks about code reuse as being the holy grail. If so, then CPAN is the castle where the grail is kept. Users of other languages such as OCaml and Lisp always talk about how they wish their language had something similar. They're jealous.

Community: PM or crack -- which is more addictive?

Natural language: According to my understanding of Perl, Mr. Wall designed Perl to be like a natural language. This is in sharp contrast to Lisp, which is rooted much more mathematically and is tough for a lot of people to think in. The upside to the natural language approach is that it meshes with a human's own system of thought and the language is easier to think in for most people. Plus you can create concise idiomatic expressions -- just look at the obfuscations.

It would be interesting to see if programmers finally cracked the elusive goal of an english language programming language in 100 years; maybe we'd all use that or a subset.

I agree with Mr. Graham that in the future the goal of programming languages will be to reduce programmer development time at the expense of processor power and memory. To this end, Perl is part of an evolutionary step.