Perl's decline was cultural

I switched to ruby because of the quality of the MRI for writing extensions. It was literally a revolution. No more SWIG, no more complex type magic, no more struggles to compile my module on end users systems. This was all wrapped by up gem as well so the switch was genuinely impossible to avoid.

This was all also at a time when Perl 6 was first starting to emerge from the vapor. The extremely wishy washy and decade long development track they put themselves on finally destroyed any notion of ever even returning to Perl. It served as the motivation to hoist all my old Perl code into ruby code.