[dozzie]

> IMO three things killed Perl, leaving it as an unpopular legacy husk [...]

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.

[yellowapple]

I find that interesting, since of those three, Perl was the first language that really "clicked" for me (Ruby was almost that language, but it didn't start clicking until after I had learned Perl; Python still ain't really clicking, though it's gotten a bit better lately).