[cutler]

It was only high performance if used with mod_perl and that was the problem for cheap hosts. HTML::Mason without mod_perl was a dog compared with PHP. Perl generally missed the boat with embedded templating. Catalyst, Mojolicious and Dancer eventually arrived but by then PHP had won. The Perl community also wasted a lot of energy trying to agree on a de facto way of doing OO. You had Damian Conway keeping it simple with blessed hashrefs on one side and kitchen sink OO with Moose on the other. In between were countless Moose riffs - Moo, Mouse, Mo. Not content with that, others opted for a Meta Object Protocol (MOP) for Perl but none of this stuck enough for Perl to compete with Python and Ruby which had OO built-in. These 2 factors are more or less why Perl lost mindshare when it mattered.