People say Perl is dead because they have not bothered to keep up to date with Perl developments. A lot who say this have not seen Perl since 5.005.

Of course it depends what they mean by "dead". You could argue that any language which does not develop and evolve is dead, but that certainly does not apply to Perl. Just look at the developments since 5.10.

The Perl 6 development has distracted some, and consider its lack of a big bang release to be a sign that Perl is stuck at some old version. Not true of course, Perl 5 lives!