I always thought Perl faded because it's write only and more readable alternatives showed up.
Why did it have to take over the world anyway?
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Why did it have to take over the world anyway?
Because it was there, mostly. In a UNIX world where text was everything, it was well suited to quick and dirty solutions (that then morphed into long-term technical debt). Most alternatives at the time were not there by default as they either were commercial or otherwise didn't have any ecosystem to expand it's utility (like CPAN - without it Perl would likely be like awk - a fully capable language, but only used for one-liners 99.999% of the time).
I never got the impression that perl's goal was to take over the world, but it was good at dealing with certain kinds of problems at a time in computing where it mattered, especially for one-offs.
The 1980s/1990s was full of many, many different data formats in a time before XML/JSON, often by long dead companies. Many a tech person was in a situation where "Oh fuck, how do I get this data out of some obscure database or other data format from some dead company that only ran on SCO UNIX or whatever into SAP/Oracle/etc" only to see somebody else already done it and made a CPAN module.
It also became an early CGI workhorse because, quite frankly, it was just there until much cleaner web-native languages started to show up.
Anecdotally, as part of some corporate lawsuits that involved stuff going back decades, a former colleague of mine recently had to grab ancient data for an insurance company from backup tapes that were last accessed in the 1980s (apparently getting readers for them was its own story). The only google results he could get for the data formats stored on them were literally usenet posts from the 1990s of people discussing working with it and...some CPAN modules somebody wrote to export it. He did chuckle when for the first time in his life he used tar without the -f switch, though.