Earlier quoted context omitted.
But how how influential was it? It seems most of the unique ideas in Perl have not been adopted by other languages. But if Perl can be credited with kick starting the dynamic language boom (Python, Ruby) then it have been massively influential.
I think it would be fair to give Perl that credit. When it was first released, there really wasn't anything else like it. There was sh/csh, awk, sed, but nothing that really showed the path forward as Perl did. That said, once Python 1.5.2 (or so) hit, Perl was done for. It was simply better , and there was no reasonable way for Perl to recover the lead, or even really coexist. Perl had a lot of momentum and took man…
Sure the percentage has gone down, but the count has gone up.