Perl's decline was cultural

Of course it was cultural. This article covers it all in more detail, but I was coding a lot in this period of Perl's decline, and in hindsight it was all so obvious.

I wrote a lot of Perl 3 and Perl 4 to date my experience.

Rails was designed to be a luxury hand-holding experience using a language that was intended - as a design goal - to make programming fun. There was even for a while in the late 2000s the culture of _why and MINSWAN.

PHP was fast, easy, forgiving. It also led to such awful code that several companies banned it. I think nearly all of us who got to deploy code with nothing more than FTP miss that. Of course today it runs more of the web than any other language.

Perl on the other hand wasn't interested in any of that, so many people just left because they were pulled by better ecosystems that took the web seriously, or pushed by a culture that believed the priesthood was real.

For me, Rails and Ruby were genuinely joyful discoveries after spending a couple of years wrestling J2EE and .NET apps in the ~2002-2005 era, and the Perl community felt crusty and unwelcome and immature by comparison.

Today I'm no fan of come of the politics of people being some popular Ruby frameworks cough, but I enjoy Ruby and I'm enjoying my dive back into systems programming via re-learning C and taking a long look at Zig. I'm not sure I'll ever write "production" Perl again.

But could a different culture have actually changed Perl to be friendly and fun like Ruby? Without completely torpedoing compatibility with existing code and essentially creating a whole new language anyway?

Or did the language itself just get outdated and replaced? (there's nothing wrong with that! most things don't last forever!)

This requires those with power to relinquish authority and/or try new, unfamiliar practices and accept possible failure.

Any company/organization can theoretically change its culture, but it's quite difficult in practice.

> PHP was fast, easy, forgiving. It also led to such awful code that several companies banned it.

That's not the case nowadays with PHP 8.5 for example... and Laravel framework.

I feel like I grokked Perl enough and I still write Perl code, but I also think that there are some technical reasons why it declined in popularity in the 2000s and 2010s. All those differences between $ % @, the idea of scalar or list context, overuse of globals, and references. These features can all make sense if you spend enough time in Perl, and can even be defended, but it creates a never-ending stream of code that looks right but is wrong, and it all seems to create a lot of complexity with very little benefit.

> [..] as a design goal - to make programming fun. There was even for a while in the late 2000s the culture of _why and MINSWAN.

It was a great time - titles like Learn You A Haskell For Great Good and Land of Lisp really capture the zeitgeist.