Decline is different from dead. The language is not dead, less people might use it. You cannot judge the popularity of a language just from, say, the position of a web programmer. Computing is so diverse now, perl will always have an active community (it seems to me) as it is very good for certain types of problems. Funnily enough, those are the problems that is was originally designed for: not CGI.

Perl is a great tool, in the tradition of the Unix command line. It is a testament to its success that is not considered to be a more powerful awk.