[dpark]

> Isn't that the crux of the issue? Perl was great if you're a hacker who 'got' it. For the remaining 95% of the population, Python worked.

It’s really not the crux of the issue though. “Better than Perl for normal developers” is not a high bar. Most languages clear that bar whether they are successful or not. This is certainly not the only reason that Python became so successful.

Tangentially, in my experience Perl was great for one liners and small glue projects. I never saw significant, valuable works of code built in Perl even when I worked at a company (Yahoo) that widely used Perl. I am convinced that much of Perl’s beauty is in its cleverness and’s not in its utility for large projects.

[BeetleB]

> “Better than Perl for normal developers” is not a high bar. Most languages clear that bar whether they are successful or not.

Dial the clock back to 2002, and this statement is not true. Perl became popular not because of its beauty, but because of it being extremely effective glue. It was a language to get stuff done while writing little code.

The only mainstream alternative was Python.

[dpark]

I see. There are two separate but related questions.

1. Why did Python replace Perl?

2. Why did Python become so extremely popular?

The answer to the first is because it’s better than Perl for so many engineers in so many cases. The answer to the second is much broader.