[devonkim]

Perl’s lunch was eaten more by Ruby IMO. The bifurcation happened as the Perl programmers that wanted a more traditional OOP system picked up Ruby and the folks writing Bash++ oftentimes went to Python. These days it seems like Ruby is where Perl was in 2010.

[JohnBooty]

    These days it seems like Ruby is where Perl was in 2010

It's more "mature" than "abandoned" IMO. I think it's in a solid place. A lot of Rubyists have moved on but so far, that's OK with me.

Unlike OP's experience with Perl, most legacy Ruby and/or Rails codebases are not too disasterous.

[orthoxerox]

That's probably because Rails hits the sweet spot. It's just complex enough to support a medium-sized website well. Most innovations since Rails have targeted high-load websites.