[michaelpinto]

Perl was a victim of its own success.

Perl is one of the few languages associated with the web that was really pre-web. It's because of Perl's inspiration that we have PHP and Python. So while the language evolved, it was never web centric at heart.

Another great thing about Perl was in the early days of the web it appealed to both real coders and script kiddies. But as time went on the script kiddies tended to move on to languages like PHP, so only the pros are really left.

The last issue with Perl was that it was never a favorite of computer science programs, so it was always a bit of a hackers language at heart. So there is a wonderful community around Perl, but it makes it very hard if you run a shop to find kids out of school who know the language vs. Java back in the day (and other languages today).

But I know a few coders who still really love Perl in hearts, so while the popularity hasn't grown I would say the language does have a very hard core dedicated following.

[bane]

> The last issue with Perl was that it was never a favorite of computer science programs

It's funny, it found a home for a long time in various linguistic programs.