How is a tool like Perl dead when it's still heavily used on hundreds of thousands of machines all over the world? Is C dead as well? I would say, a tool is dead when it's no longer in wide use. Perl is hardly in that category quite yet.
Your point stated more generally is that while C is the best tool for a wide set of use cases, for each of the one-time use cases of Perl there is now a better option
