> Python only just barely survived the jump from 2 to 3.

In the timeframe we're talking here (late 1990s), that transition was Python1 to Python2! A couple Linux distributions were on Python 1.5.2 for a very, very long time. All y'all forget that what Guido, et al. did for the Python 2 to Python 3 transition was informed by the grief they hit in the Python 1 to Python 2 transition!

I would argue that really "What killed Perl" was that people started writing bigger scripts than one-liners. Perl has a well-deserved reputation for being a "Write Only(tm)" language. Python (and really just about every scripting language of the time) was simply better for containing complexity and easier for a newbie to understand.

I remember taking printouts of Perl and Python scripts for the same task to job interviews. The Perl one always had some surprise for the interviewer no matter how hard I tried to remove them. The Python one ... was simply straightforward.

If you had a hard, one-time problem, you always went to the perl wizard; he could do anything to anything given a bit of time.

Even build an entire web-based GUI for a product.

But eventually you realized that if you wanted to reuse the code, or have others work on it, the downsides of Python began to pale.