> There are many languages still in use today that have all kinds of warts and ugliness, but they remain in use

What's an example of a language that's as bad as Perl, that's used as widely as Perl was, that's still in use today?

Perl died because everyone who mattered knew it was a bad language, knew it had to undergo drastic changes, but that essentially meant implementing a new language.

Perl 6 was the symptom, not the cause.

---

Note: by "bad language", I mean bad for anything much beyond the kind of thing you might use awk for. It was bad not because of subjective aesthetic issues, but because it was difficult to maintain non-trivial code bases. Its "write only" reputation was well-deserved - the original author of a non-trivial Perl program might be able to maintain it, but once a team is involved, forget it.