Perl is  becoming very niche and out of demand. It’s true that someone in tech would “take up” the perl (or the apache, mysql, Delphi …) full time jobs at a comfortable salary, but I don’t want to be one of them.

Majority of programmers in finance aren’t working on trading systems. It might also be true that the majority of programmers aren’t in finance and java/c++, so maybe I should feel less lonely in those domains like perl. However, in reality, I would feel deeply lonely in those domain. I feel deeply “mainstream” if I’m in trading/java/c++, not even c#