[mhd]

People don't really care about how hard it is to parse a language, and complex grammers might actually be due to making it easier for humans. One of the bigger differences is IDE support, but more regular languages that compete with Perl had about the same issue here...

Perl derives its dislike from about the same source as BASIC (and arguably PHP): Early errors/preconceptions and plenty of non-programmers writing code (home computer users, sysadmins). Perl4 was used for some pretty hacky jobs, replacing sed/awk/shell combinations (which were horribly fragmented across the unices of that time). Modular Perl5 code had little to do with that, but by then the damage was done. Early CGI scripts didn't exactly help, either.

Modern Perl is a step further than that, but when Moose and the like became popular, people already moved away to PHP or Ruby, both being part of the same family.