Excellent reflections! Thanks for sparking new ideas in my wicked brain.
I think that there is no doubt that Perl, Haskell and other great languages (especially the 'free' ones) will (or should I say 'should') never actually die, just by applying the natural selection principle of adaptability.
But in this day and age we have an external factor, called marketing, that acts like a great meteorite, and in an instant, can kill off perfectly adapted, diverse and balanced species set, leading eventually to the survival of not so positive and destructive creatures, like for example , man, who obviously wants to be the _olny_ species left on the planet.
What I am trying to say is that if dinosaurs had used marketing, many of the well adapted ones would probably be around today serving as much needed predators to man, and extending the life of our beloved spaceship.
So even though Perl is not a dinosaur (although many may argue that it is) and Java is not nearly as destructive as man, I think we definitively need more marketing.
We need brochures, white papers and shut-your-mouth success stories that we can take to meetings and kill the argument before the language flame even starts. We also need stories where Java has failed miserably, and better yet if it has been replaced or 'enhanced' by the use of Perl, or any of the other great 'free' languages. We need for the companies thay use Perl to come forward and say: "Yes, I use Perl and I'm proud!".