[chrisseaton]

I think what happened to Perl is that its approach (puns, whimsy, ornate symbols, multiple ways to do the same thing) suddenly became extremely unfashionable with the rise in popularity of more clean and simple languages like Python and Ruby (although Ruby had a much more whimsical US community in the past, it's not part of the core language community in the same way.)

Almost overnight everything about Perl seemed very old fashioned. Maybe their style of programming will suddenly become popular again? But doesn't look like it's coming soon.

[brnt]

I don't think those things became unfashionable, it was just not what people who were until then (late 90ies) not programmers were looking for. They were looking to get shit done (tm) and verbosity (Java) or clarity (Python) suited what they were looking for much better than Perl (a clever language for clever programmers).

[s_kilk]

I think that's a large part of it, yes, but a lot of folks saw the demented weirdness of perl and were (rightfully) turned off. And by that time there were sane alternatives available.

[Scarbutt]

Well, Ruby has Rails and it is still declining very fast, it's very hard to seen it come up back again, Perl has no chance.

[joelbluminator]

Don't think Ruby is declining anymore tbh, neither is PHP. They were once hugely popular and then shrank back to moderate usage; any data to back up that Ruby is losing usage over the last 3-5 years?

[Scarbutt]

https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2019/3

Unlike Java/C#, I would say github is a good indicator for Ruby.

[chrisseaton]

Does that show it's declining? It's proportion of pull requests, not absolute pull requests. Ruby could still be growing if the whole system is growing.