Perl _has_ died gracefully.
An increasing risk of using Perl is that your dependencies may be rotting without you noticing it. And this may happen in multiple ways:
* Modules that use some arcane syntax that's being deprecated.
* Modules that link against libraries that are still being developed
* Web APIs that are still evolving.
Perl's great strength has always been CPAN, and with its decreasing popularity that's now becoming a weakness.
For instance, Amazon::S3 was last released in 2009. AWS::S3 was last released in 2019. Net::Amazon::S3 seems alive and well, but the "++ed by 6 PAUSE users" isn't very comforting.
I'm personally increasingly switching away from Perl, because I've been noticing the concerning amount of familiar modules whose last release was several years ago, which has bugs that went completely unacknowledged on the bug tracker for years, and the realization that there are big, complex modules that may be depending on some random person in Nebraska.
This is of course not a new issue, but it's particularly acute when an ecosystem is no longer "sexy" and people start moving on to greener pastures.
I would argue that the problem you see isn't so much with perl (although it's definitely less popular) but with the exponential dependency explosion with little verification that results from these sorts of systems.
At some point, something in the S3 API is going to change. Crypto modules are going to add some algorithms and deprecate others. Some big system library is going to release version 2.0. Ubuntu is going to stop the last LTS release where everything worked.
At my workplace we used to make very heavy use of Perl, and now that's gradually going away, because there's a fair amount of pretty big stuff that's either unmaintained, or at the very least concerning. The Wx module for instance has always been a bit of a pain in my experience and I don't know how much life it's got left. But I'm certainly not going to volunteer to maintain it if it ever breaks.
If Perl can only get the transformation piece where another language gets you to the last part then there is less reason to use Perl at all. That was Perl's bread and butter. It was the king of data transformation. It was even used (is used) to prototype data conversion from COBOL to xml. I've even seen it parsing COBOL code for keyword highlighting and hosting a website to view the results.
I could easily write that in SCALA today in a one stop shop, arguably faster.
Perl isn't dead but its not exactly alive. And let's face it, it isn't really being taught in schools anymore. It and PHP were when I was in college. Can any language fall to this fate? Sure, but if you stick with Java/Scala/Kotlin, Javascript/Typescript/Node and .Net/C#/F# you are pretty safe for a decade or two. Perl is just the weeds in the garden at this point.
And now you have a situation where you may be stuck - unable to update your program even if you want to until all dependencies are updated.
Paws is actively developed too: https://metacpan.org/pod/Paws
I'm sympathetic to Perl, having gotten a huge amount of value from it over the years, but I'd bet that at its peak it was less than 10% of the number of lines of code written in COBOL since the latter had close to half a century head start and the fields where it was used made it a key component of the global financial network. That's generally harder to replace than the average Perl code and since there was a direct value visible from it companies also were less hesitant to hire people to throw bodies at maintenance.
That probably depends on your bubble, but I've interacted with more code in Fortran and Cobol than in Perl. And Fortran and Cobol were "almost dead" long before I started my first job.
Dunno, I think glue languages like perl are inherently easier to replace than platform languages. And perl was only best at being a glue language for a very short period in 90s.
`perl -pe 's/foo/bar/g'`
Is there anything else present on most machines that offers as much regex-fu as perl?
For perlre, probably not.
“Perl still has its uses. For tiny projects (100 lines or fewer) that involve a lot of text pattern matching, I am still more likely to tinker up a Perl-regexp-based solution […] Actually, these are much like the things Perl did in its original role as a sort of combination awk/sed/grep/sh, before it had functions and direct access to the operating system API.”
— https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882
Personally, I write these kind of things in actual awk, sed, and shell script. If these are not sufficient, I skip Perl altogether and go directly to some modern higher-level language.