Perl does not die easily because of the way many of us learned it. We started to used it for sysadmin automation (prehistoric DevOps) and then the early Web showed up and we used it for that too.

After 15 years (much more the 10,000 hours of use) it was hard to forget. And that over 15 years ago. Once you have it in your brain it does not go away easily.

I teach Python but I still think in Perl.