As someone who still loves Perl I don't want to say Perl is mostly-dead, but it's dying and it influenced all popular scripting languages today.
What’s merlyn doing these days?
His response to the early warnings that “Perl is dying “ was “more people use Perl now more than ever”
The downfall of Perl should be a “case study”. Other communities should learn from the Perl community’s mistakes.
Java also had many problems for quite some time but its frequent update cycle seems to have helped.
It looks like he's still doing Perl:
http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-perl-8th/97814...