The great displacement is already well underway?

Perl also destroyed itself by growing an arrogant community that would eagerly race to be the first to shout "RTFM" at a modest inquiry by someone new to the language.

That was not my experience (at least with perlmonks) back when I used Perl, but maybe I'm mis-remembering things.

I think part of Perl's downfall was that TMTOWTDI became too many ways to do one thing, and it was too easy to create terse, unreadable code. Basically, the opposite direction of modern concepts like "idiomatic Go".

I'm sad that Perl is dying while people are still writing fucking bash scripts in production code. (Perl is still better than that!)

Perl was great! But perl came and went.

Shell scripts are forever. So far.

Perl is still here, lurking in the corner.

Huh. As someone who worked in Perl a very long time ago, my strong impression was always that Perl died almost entirely due to Perl 6/Second System Syndrome; Perl 5.x became, implicitly, the already-outdated thing, and yet Perl 6 wouldn't meaningfully exist for like two decades.

There was that, too. But I remember people being happy to use the latest Perl 5 and expecting it to be continually updated (which is still is today). Perl 6 was considered a different language altogether at best, and vapourware at worst.

Still, I can definitely see someone new to the language thinking Perl 5 was a dead end.