Perl won't become the next COBOL, as COBOL only got that way because of the reasons outlined in the article: the financial sector used it extensively, and their systems are too mission-critical and they're too afraid to break things by upgrading.
Contrast with Perl, which was mainly used by niche hackers (in the original, respectful sense), used in the types of products that live by the SV valley motto of "move fast and break things".
> Contrast with Perl, which was mainly used by niche hackers (in the original, respectful sense), used in the types of products that live by the SV valley motto of "move fast and break things".
Umm, no, I think you have a very poor idea of what Perl was and is used for, and who used it. I imagine Perl is still in heavy use (if not heavy development) in the back-end of some Banks. Perl was also used to power many of the web circa 1999. Some of the big names that used it are Amazon and Craigslist. Perl was one of the main languages used on the internet pre-2000. Much has changes since then, but let's not rewrite history to completely ignore Perl's role in where we are today.
Amazon and Craigslist still use it. Craigslist extensively and ongoing. Amazon according to my understanding did something with a (rather crappy) perl templating language to compile it down to C++ in a similar way to what Facebook did with PHP to hack. My understanding is that's still in use, but probably not undergoing extensive development.
Contrast with Perl, which was mainly used by niche hackers (in the original, respectful sense), used in the types of products that live by the SV valley motto of "move fast and break things".