Python and Ruby killed Perl.

Before Perl, there was no scripting language that could do systems tasks except maybe shell and tcl, but that's shell is an extremely unpleasant programming experience and the performance is horrid, and tcl's string-based nature is just too weird.

Perl gives you something more like a real programming language and can do shell-like tasks and systems tasks very nicely. Compared to what came before, it is amazing.

But then Ruby and Python came along and checked the "real programming language" box even more firmly than Perl while retaining the shell/systems angle. Ruby and Python were better than Perl along exactly the same axis as the one on which Perl was better than Tcl and shell.

IMHO Python killed both Perl and Ruby. While Ruby is more alive than Perl it's nowhere near as popular as Python.

I like Perl and used it professionally for year and vaguely remember probably around 2010x relatively massive Python evangelism (lots of articles, conferences, lots of messages from Python adepts on forums e.t.c). One of talking points (no longer needed nowadays) was that Python is backed (sponsored) by Google so Python will be successful and you should not worry about it's future and also if you will choose Python you will be successful (as Google is).

> and tcl's string-based nature is just too weird.

TCL had the ability dynamically load and call into .so’s which was really powerful. Those who knew, knew.

> "Perl gives you something more like a real programming language ..."

It is a real general-purpose programming language, not a "scripting" language. Did you ever have a look at it?