Comment by daotoad

Perl was the perfect language when the majority of people wanting to use it already knew shell, sed, awk, and C.

It succeeded because it was a beautiful and horrible combination of those tools/languages. If you know those things, Perl is really easy to bang together and generate a webpage or use to automate administrative task.

Given Larry Wall's education, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Perl underwent a linguistic evolution from pidgin[1] to creole[2].

I came to Perl a bit late, not being a super adept user of Unix and only having written C in school. I'd put myself in the category of Perl developer that was part of the second "creole language" phase of Perl's development. I learned a ton of Unix and got better at C by learning Perl.

While Perl's mixed nature made it successful, when the world of web development expanded to include more people without the necessary background to benefit from the admixture, it went from asset to hinderance. All that syntax went from instantly familiar to bizarre. A perfect example of this are the file test operators[3].

The Perl 6 struggles definitely added to the difficulties posed by the changing nature of the web dev community. They created enough uncertainty that tons of people asked themselves "Why should I learn Perl 5 when Perl 6 is just around the corner?". That slowed adoption from in the 2001-2010 timeframe while Python and Ruby grew rapidly.

Rakulang is kind of magical. Writing it is like using a language given to us by aliens. I wish it was getting more uptake because it is fun and truly mind expanding to write.

In the end, I think the shifting nature of the community was a larger factor in the decline of Perl than the slow Perl 6 rollout and failure of messaging around it.

I still love writing Perl 5 and I wish I got to do more of it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language [3] https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/-X