Sorry to be putting it this bluntly, but I haven't seen a bigger self congratulatory crowd than the Perl community in my whole life.

Programming tools and technologies, come and go in cycles of trends. Over the past years I've worked on numerous Perl projects, many of them had an explicitly goal of moving away from Perl at the earliest. In fact nearly every Perl project I've worked on has been a migration project. No one is doing serious work in Perl.

And Perl has missed many boats, We were not there where Application servers were all the rage, when Python started spreading like wildfire in the scientific computing community, when web frameworks were the talk of the years, when asynchronous programming frameworks peaked, and now when Big data is all over the place. All we have done and doing is merely playing a catch up game with the rest. This is not going to fly anywhere in the larger programming community. Shops that are already using Perl may continue to support existing applications, but it makes no sense for them to start new Perl projects.

We were there in the early parts of the web, when people thought writing a Perl script was better than writing a shell script. And all we've done from there there is live in an assumption that, that is all we ever need

We have a language where no new big changes can happen, We are not going to get sub routine signatures, no try/catch, never a class key word, never get all the OO goodies default out of the bag, We are never going to move out of XS, we are going to keep the wheels running. But no one has any reason to use this for doing anything new or serious.

Perl isn't even in the list of languages which kids these days have heard of. Because when they were in college, Perl is what their seniors two decades back used. Managers by and large, either don't have a high opinion of Perl or given absolute low support for it among team mates, don't even count it as a viable alternate these days. You can convince them to use it for some small time automation, or some other unix work, but they are not going to allow you to use it do serious work.

Perl 6.0.0 can change all that. But we are waiting indefinitely to see some light at the end of the tunnel. There is no telling when we can see a usable Perl 6 to do some serious work. And any one who asks for a date, is immediately labelled a troll for requesting a time bound closure to this project. For nearly all practical purposes Perl 6 is a bit a like 'Pursuit of happiness', the whole story is always how awesome the future is going to be, which never comes to arrive.

Based on all this, I guess if all you want is to make a living and are willing to develop deep expertise in some language I guess JVM languages are the way to go, Java, Scala with some Python.