[perigrin]

Not exactly true. The current lead maintainer for Perl 5 is in his mid 30s at a guess, a large chunk of us are between that and our early 50s. This puts most of us around a decade or two out from retirement.

That said the Perl community does lack a steady stream of fresh young people ready to do impossible things because they don't know they're impossible.

[chaostheory]

That doesn’t look like the general trend even in the early 2000s. Perl projects tend to be the maintenance of old systems instead of the development of new ones. New blood is pooling around JS/TS and Python. At best Perl’s popularity has stagnated.

[perigrin]

Most of it's developers and advocates have moved on to other more popular languages is arguably true (in addition to JS/TS I see a lot of Perl devs moving to Go). I know I personally do very little Perl despite working on a team where a significant portion of the work is done in Perl that is less than 2 years old.

But that's not what you claimed, you claimed the developers and advocates were mostly retiring. And that simply doesn't appear to be true ... yet. Give it 10-20 years and I'll expect it to be very true.

I'd also say that Perl's popularity is effectively gone in the general use of the term. While some new development is actually being done in Perl, IME the only people choosing it are already Perl advocates.