In the USA, Perl 5 is officially, as of today, the legal age to consume alcoholic beverages. (Today is the anniversary of Perl version 5's release, not the anniversary of the Perl language itself).

I must admit that I both (a) have scripts that were written for Perl 4 in personal production (i.e., I'm the the only user), and (b) that I still code most in Perl 5 more than any other language (not that I write much code anymore, sadly).

Perl 6 will be released officially this year. Obviously it won't have the success that Perl 5 had in its heyday. (cf my blog post for the 25th birthday of Perl itself: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2012/12/18/perl-cobol.html ).

I must admit again that I feel old enough that Perl 5 was once "a new Perl" to me. I watched Perl 5 have success that was beyond imagination. It's not that there were ever, say, more Perl 5 developers *ever* in its history than there are Javascript or Java developers today. That's not it. But Perl for a long time was the language that *almost everyone* who wanted to do something other than C used.

Programming language options are so varied today, and there are so many target platforms that didn't exist 21 years ago. As such, there is no "one cool programming language" (despite what the Javascript kids tell themselves). The community of software developers is just too big now for there to be any real contest between languages. So many languages exist that don't try to compete for developers. The world is too big for there to be the kind of affinity toward one programming language in the way there was 20 years ago. It's difficult to explain what the world was like then, but you really could be a "one language person" in those days, and be proud of it rather than sheltered and disconnected.