| Perl used to have fans with meetups and so on. I've not heard of these for a long time. IMO three things killed Perl, leaving it as an unpopular legacy husk: - loss of ecosystem. The high points for Perl were CGI.pm and its use as a "super awk" by sysadmins. The first was obliterated by other ecosystems, better and worse: PHP, Rails, Node, Go, and so on. The second was obliterated by "servers are cattle not pets": people have moved from meticulous hand-administration to the use of containers, Ansible, etc - or away from systems administration altogether to AWS or "serverless". - Perl 6 transition. Second-system effect at its highest. The long wait for this to be completed absolutely destroyed incremental improvement because everyone was waiting for a big bang that came very late. Python managed to avoid this level of community damage but has still split into two languages, Python 2 and Python 3. - the "two Perls" of style; one was the Wall-influenced style that looked a bit like English. The other was sigil-heavy and incomprehensible. Eventually people decided that it was easier to put up with syntactic whitespace than remember all the $? and $| and so on, so a lot of the Perl audience moved to Python. |
I don't really think it was any of these. There's much simpler mechanics at play here: Perl's competition (Python and Ruby) has about the same expressiveness, but is much easier to learn, so for a long time very few people have chosen Perl to learn. There was simply not enough young blood to replace old timers that were retiring, dying, or migrating to other languages.