A perl programmer asks why ditch perl? on the Perl Reddit. I briefly considered alternatives in my Is Perl My Perfect Compromise post. 18 months later there is a clearer answer:

Of the “big three general purpose scripting languages”, Perl is improving most quickly, has the best libraries and the most jobs available. There is no compelling reason to switch to Python or Ruby and plenty of good reasons to stay with Perl.

At my job Perl is one of the sanctioned languages and it makes work fun. Over the past 18 months, improvements have been coming thick and fast (go go Moose and regular release cycles). For Windows development Strawberry Perl is getting better and better.

Outside of web development CPAN is better than the Python and Ruby equivalents and Python has inferior scoping anyway.

None of the minority languages mentioned in my previous post such as Clojure, Scheme and Haskell have gained any traction so there is no need to discuss them further here.