Python killed Perl.

By the time Perl 6 was around, Perl's lunch was already eaten by Python. Only a few table scraps left. Perl 6 would have had to be a better Perl 5 and a better Python 2 to win.

Python came with better batteries and better syntax. It allowed producing code you could read and understand a week later. Perl I found was a write-only language for me. I went back looking at my old Perl code and I couldn't decipher it without some effort.

And Python became popular not just because it was a better Perl, but it attracted folks who used Java and C++. CPU speeds were getting fast enough that you could actually do file and network IO at acceptable speeds without all the `public static void main(String[] args)` and `System.out.println(...)` boilerplate, but still had all the object oriented bits like inheritance and composition with which you could go crazy with if you wanted.

> Perl 6 would have had to be a better Perl 5 and a better Python 2 to win.

Don't sell perl 6 short. I am using perl 6 for significant projects now (after a career of perl 5) - and it's fundamentally different. I describe it as perl to the power of perl.

For me, expressiveness is fundamental. And perl 6 gives me that.

Perl 6 is simply suffering from python being everywhere. And perl 5 was always easy to lampoon as "line noise". It's a stupid quip, but it leaves a mark on new programmers. You don't even need to read the course and you can already have an opinion. Stupid kills?

Personal anecdote in support: my first job out of college was at a data-analysis company, where my task was usually to write one-off scripts to extract data from various data sources and massage it into the format the analysts wanted for their spreadsheets. I wrote most of those scripts in Perl at first, with the odd Bash script here and there. Then one of my coworkers said "Hey, if you like Perl, you'll love Python". I learned Python (2.1 was the most recent version at the time, which tells you how old this story is) and almost immediately switched over. All my new one-off data-extraction scripts from then on were written in Python (though still with the odd Bash script here and there).

Agreed. In grad school, I used Perl to script running my benchmarks, post-process my data and generate pretty graphs for papers. It was all Perl 5 and gnuplot. Once I saw someone do the same thing with Python and matplotlib, I never looked back. I later actually started using Python professionally, as I believe lots of other people had similar epiphanies. And not just from Perl, but from different languages and domains.

I think the article's author is implicitly not considering that people who were around when Perl was popular, who were perfectly capable of "understanding" it, actively decided against it.

I would bet against this hypothesis.

Perl exploded because it was the easiest, richest ecosystem available to plug into CGI and the web.

PHP & Ruby & Python then collectively covered the same waterfront whether you wanted “easy” or “fun” or “simple”.

And I would propose that PHP attracting the developer cohort who wanted “easy” and Ruby/Rails attracting the developer cohort who wanted “fun” were each individually more damaging to the Perl ecosystem than Python.

> By the time Perl 6 was around...

Just my opinion, but this says more about perl 6's insane development schedule than python's advantages.

PHP also contributed. Perl CGIs were a very popular way to build early web apps.