Here we go again ...
If you've not read already, the latest YAPC Survey results are out. It seems at least one quantitative interpretation (here and here) of the data is that we're all dead and/or dying.
Is this a new remark?
No.
Would these remarks go away if suddenly every human developer on Earth started programming in Perl.
I doubt it.
Perl.
I posted the following response, but the blog gives no indication that my response was received or is awaiting moderation:
There are several interesting things here. First, how you recruit and who you are is going to impact who you find for developers. If you're "asking your friends", that may not be a representative sample. Since my wife and I are now doing international IT recruiting, I promise you that we're hitting *plenty* of applicants who know Perl, who are younger and who are not experts at it. That being said, I wouldn't generalize from my experiences, either. I did, however, note a very interesting thing: those of our candidates who pay attention to the community are more likely to produce higher quality code (in terms of functionality and fewer bugs).
That last point brings me to conferences: I suspect we'd find the same issue there. Someone who is not involved at all in the community may be less likely to go to a conference due to lack of knowledge of them. Someone who is heavily involved is more likely to know about conferences and thus more likely to go to them. Thus, we may find a built-in bias towards skilled individuals producing your graphs above.
Or, given my experience with many developers, your graphs above could very well be plotting the Dunning-Kruger effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect).
If you compile similar graphs for other "single language" conferences, then I'd find this more useful.