[cat199]

> web, systems automation, data processing, science and a few more.

doesn't this apply to python, although now there are additional competitors?

> reinvented itself as a web language (Mojolicious, Plack).

highly opinionated and potentially flame creating , but -

perl was the original web language in the CGI era, PHP pretty much dethroned it due to simplicity of server integration, rails knocked them both out of 'leading edge', then the Node/SPA era arrived.

mojolicious / plack are pretty much things to bring perl up to date w/r/t the 'rails' type

[hnick]

I've long thought if they had PHP-style inline HTML/Perl templates it would've given the language some legs. I'm pretty sure it exists (since I remember using it back in the day as a toy, just like JSP and other stacks), but it either came too late or didn't take off before PHP stole the throne.

I love Perl but I'm currently looking at around a decade of experience which is really hard to take into a new role. I'm working a bit on Wordpress now but PHP is basically close enough to Perl for me that it sits in a weird uncanny valley where I get things just wrong enough to cause headaches every time.