Comment by cuddlybacon

I had lots of experience writing Perl5 before the company switched to Python3.

> The inability of the Perl community to push forward collectively in a timely way should be taken by every other language community as a cautionary tale.

I think this is a good point that I hadn't considered before.

I think Perl stopped being able to attract new users. There is always going to be users leaving. If they aren't replaced, you will slowly shrink.

I think the point you raised is part of why they couldn't attract new users. I also think people asked themselves "why chose perl now, if I know I need to re-write when Perl6 comes?" and decided Perl5 was bad choice. I also think the fact Perl had this reputation for being ugly, difficult, and "write only line noise" kept people from even considering it, even if that reputation didn't match production codebases.