Perl is certainly going to be around in 5 years. The core Perl5 guys make a (testing) release every 6 months. You know it’s testing, development or minor because it’s an odd number and minor (like, 5.15.x), whereas stable releases are large even numbers (5.16). 5.16 is the current stable, though by now there’s prolly a bug-fix version 5.16.something. A stable release is supported actively for 2 years, and security fixes for 3. A lot of the innovation is porting was-experimental stuff from Perl6 to Perl5, and Perl6 has inspiration from various cool places like Haskell and OCAML, among others.
Perl also has a large, worldwide, vibrant community (and sub-communities, mostly based on geographic location, known as monge(u)r groups) and members are active on places like StackOverflow. CPAN has also been getting some remakes: there’s metaCPAN, a better search engine for finding things on CPAN (and one of the filters is activity, to more easily find what’s been abandoned vs actively maintained), and cpanminus for easy_install-like builds of modules.
Re the Object system: Larry Wall once said:
However many didn’t like the Perl-version-of-Python-objects present in early Perl 5. People outside Perl don’t seem to know it’s now got a nice clean OO layer (Moose, Mouse or Moo) if you want, where you can use roles and traits to your liking, and it’s got WSGI implementations too, PSGI (usually using Plack middleware between your app and whatever servers).
So I’d say Perl is pretty alive, but the number of developers is dropping, or maybe more accurately, new programmers haven’t heard of viable Modern Perl and so there’s not the same stream of noobs coming in like some other languages have.