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_dan 5 hours ago

My experience of working with Perl as a primary language from late 90s to today: Perl was dead long before Perl 6/Raku was a real thing. By the time that happened it had already lost massive ground to PHP, Python, Java, etc.

PHP had replaced CGI as the easiest way to get code on a webserver, Python and Java were easier to read and understand, easier to structure large systems with, and generally easier to use. Ruby came along and MVC frameworks became the thing for complex web platforms.

Meanwhile Perl was sorta keeping up, the "Modern Perl" movement helped dispel myths about "write only" code, things like Moose, DBIC, Catalyst, Mojolicious, etc meant you could write pretty modern stuff with it. But the community was smaller, fractured by Perl 6 and dominated by some ahem divisive characters which made it intimidating for newcomers, and it just slowly died from there.

By the time Stack Overflow came along it was easy to see that other languages had vibrant communities surrounding them and for me it never really recovered.