Perl's decline was cultural

Nah Perl just wasn't a very good language. Not every language is equally good.

I spent year developing CMS in Perl in 1999 (HTA application with ActivePerl. wonder if anybody else did something like this). It traumatized me, and first thing that I did in my next job is to learn python and develop some core systems in it. Few of my friends moved from perl to python as well.

I still remember spending time with my coworkers on bench outside of building trying to figure out #@$%$^&$%@something = []sd[dsd]@$#!&lala lines written by previous developers

No. Perl died because other languages starting having an equivalent to CPAN and its extremely flexible syntax does not scale for medium to large team coordination.

I was a fairly heavy user of Perl, but eventually migrated to Python. The primary reason was the generally abysmal quality of what was in CPAN compared to what was available as third-party packages for Python. I found myself having to spend way too much time fixing stuff I pulled down from CPAN far more than I'd need to for Python for the same functionality. Undoubtedly Perl stuff got better, but I didn't have time to wait.

I agree and Steve Yegge covered the reasons well here: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/ancient-languages-...

His point about references is no small thing. Other dynamic languages don’t make users think much about the distinction between references and values at the syntax level. With Perl you needed to use “->” arrow operator frequently if and only if you were using references. So getting at a map inside an array or vice versa had its own syntax vs reading a string in a map or array.

Also it had bolted on, awkward OO on top of the bolted on, awkward params passing. You literally had to shift “self” (or “this”) off a magical array variable (@_).

By default it wouldn’t warn if you tried to read from an undeclared variable or tried to use one in a conditional or assign from one. You had to declare “use strict;” for that. Which wasn’t hard! But these awkward things piled up, a bunch of small cuts. Don’t forget “use warnings;” also, another thing to put at the top of every Perl file.

To the extent its awkward syntax came out of aping of shell and common Unix cli tools, you could maybe see it as cultural issue if you squint.

But any language in the mid 90s was infected with the “rtfm” priesthood vibe the author writes about, because the internet then was disproportionately populated by those sysop types, especially the part that can answer programming language questions on usenet, which is basically where you had to ask back then.

So for example Rails won for technical reasons, it is much more concise with fewer footguns than its Perl equivalents. I was actively coding web stuff in Perl when it came along and early switched. It wasn’t a cultural thing, having choice in Perl was fine (and ruby has sadly never grown much culture outside Rails - it could really use some). It probably did help that it came along in the mid aughts by which time you could ask questions on the web instead of Usenet. And it used YouTube for that first rails demo. So ruby did end up with a less sysopy culture but that had more to do with the timing of its success than the success itself.