"you can also see this from the number of noisy evangelists vs. professional users nowadays"
Actually, where I work, we use Perl almost exclusively. I don't know a single person who I would consider a "noisy evangelist" - we just quietly get stuff done.
Maybe the noisy evangelists are the only ones with enough confidence to publicly proclaim that they use Perl. The others lack confidence and don't publicly announce it because the general programming community responds with disdain / pity.
Nah I've never met anyone in the Perl community who seemed to care much about what other people thought about their language choice. Also most Perl developers I've met tend to be polygots so they're less likely to be the yelly "THIS IS THE ONE TRUE LANGUAGE" type.
There is a Steve Yeggie quote, though its not necessarily praise for Perl, which always pops to mind when people have a rant about Perl:
'As I've done for a great many other programming languages, I've bashed on Perl's technical weaknesses at length in the past. To my continued amazement, the Perl folks are the only ones who never get upset. They just say "Haha, yeah, boy, you're right, it sure is ugly. Heh. Yeah, so, um, anyway, I'm going to get back to work now..." It's awesome. I've gained so much respect for them. It's almost enough to make me go back to programming in Perl. Well almost.'
Actually, where I work, we use Perl almost exclusively. I don't know a single person who I would consider a "noisy evangelist" - we just quietly get stuff done.