>and [Python, Ruby] will get their turn at being the whipping boy.

I don't know about that. I think a large reason for the fan boys' FUD against Perl is that the three languages are quite similar. Competition.

Edit: What I mean is, the coming new languages will probably be quite different and fill different ecological niches.

You can make a good argument that today with Moose/CPAN etc, Perl 5 is hard-to-beat as a development environment. The main disadvantage IMHO is that it is a lot to learn.

I really don't know what good can be said about PHP though, which is eating all three's lunch. (-: What was Larry Wall's quote? "Takes worse is better to new depths". :-)