[ghosttrails]

I don't think Perl lost "It", but it did lose the Web.

There's tons of Unix back-end glue written in Perl, and I imagine tons still being written right now, but as a language for web-apps it just didn't get critical mass for some reason.

I think krf's comment might be part of the answer. I've had to do some mod_perl recently and the documentation is very patchy even now. I shudder to think what it might have been like 5 years ago.