I can only follow my own nose, of course, but I work for a company that deals with medical information. (I'm not sure I'm allowed to mention the name, so I won't. Shakespeare had the right attitude about lawyers.) Recently we started offering our data to customers in new formats with our home-made Perl parsers. The customers have jumped on it with both feet, and those who are new to it want to learn more about Perl, because it is so compact and (for what we're doing) simple.

Again, this is a small anecdote from someone who programs in Perl (among other languages), but taking one thing with another, I'd hardly say Perl is 'less popular'. It may not garner attention from journalists, but by and large, journalists are journalists because they can't be trusted with snake control in Ireland. Has anyone ever noticed that when a technology writer gets an idea, he generally gets it all wrong?