Does it matter? Think how you want to present yourself on the market. Do you want to be a constructor, or someone who masters a specific tool? If you're going to buy a chair, do you care which brand hammer the carpenter used?

I've always seen Perl as a tool. For me, it's my most important tool. All my employers I've had in the past 10 years have considered Perl to be a tool. They've been fine with me using Perl to do certain things. They would have been fine if I had used C, Java or Python as well. Does the customer care? Not at all. He just wants to the reports to be printed if he pushes the print button, or to see graphs on the screen, or his machine booting, or the databases staying up, or whatever I've done with Perl in the past decade or so.

5 years from now, I expect 5.10.x to be in production, with 5.12 to be out soon. I don't expect perl6 to be production ready by then. I still expect to see at least a dozen Perl conferences and workshops a year. O'Reilly will still be cranking out Perl books. Perlmonks will still be there, and so will #perl. clpm will decline further. Mailing lists will still be active, and we will have a record number of Perl mongers groups.

10 years from now, Larry Wall will announce he'll be running for president, and on January 24, 2017, Larry will be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, succeeding Hillary Clinton.