[perlperson]

Lots of interesting comments about Perl's shortcomings here. I think it's safe to say both Ruby and Python became popular because they addressed this sentiment -- for instance, type "man ruby" and notice references to Perl twice in the description. Python's "one way to do it" was a direct reaction to Perl's motto "there's more than one way to do it".

Perl 6/Raku was also a response to Perl's shortcomings. The rewrite has allowed the language to leapfrog several other languages in various ways. Without going into details, I'm thinking about just concurrency, gradual typing, parsing, method dispatch, unicode handling -- digging into any one of these topics reveals a lot of richness to be explored.