Perl 5.

Perl 4 was a great upgrade to bash as a scripting language. Perl 5 added a bunch of complexity to remake Perl into a programming language. It failed.

Perl 4 was a great scripting language whereas Perl 5 was a terrible programing language. Perl 5 lost to the better (dynamic) programming languages and bash reclaimed the scripting title as Perl 4 was dead.

Interesting take! I wasn't around for perl 4. I didn't like perl 5, but I was quite interested in 6 at the start. For a moment it looked like Larry Wall had really reflected on the problems of perl 5, and was going to make a new language that was at once cleaner and more systematic, even though it had more features. Then he kept adding more shiny things and I lost interest.

No.

I came to Perl when Perl 4 was the latest.

I was using it as a frame work for distributed computing, moving data between machines.

I was on the point of throwing it all away for C++ when Perl5 came out.

I forget the details, but it made everything possible, and did not get in my way like Perl 4 did.