[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.