[nemo]

There were two sides - PHP was eating a ton of share from Perl for people and businesses who just wanted to get some simple web thing going. Sun pulled out the "Java is Enterprise" card early and successfully marketed it as being a professional scalable web programming solution for enterprise class applications with a few targeted buzzwords for whatever market segment they were going for. Perl seemed like it was always looked at as an amateur tool (much as PHP/ASP generally were), while Java was taken seriously in "enterprise" spaces (largely due to Sun's success at marketing Java to businesses).

There's a wrinkle, too. Perl isn't just a web thing. It was (and is) still used in "enterprise" spaces for scripting on servers. It's still out there being used to create scripts rather than applications. In that space Ruby/Python are competing, but there's still plenty of sysadmins who use Perl since it works.

[pjmlp]

> In that space Ruby/Python are competing, but there's still plenty of sysadmins who use Perl since it works.

I don't know how it looks now, but if you login into the likes of HP-UX, Aix, Solaris and so on, usually only Perl is available.

This is what made me learn Perl, back when I was mostly into Python (.com days).