> Perl was (and still is) a very expressive and concise language for working with text and a unix-style system. It exists in the odd space between a shell language and a general purpose language.

GvR explicitly describes the motivation behind Python in similar terms (I can probably find a timestamp in that recent documentary for this). But the goal there was to be fully "general purpose" (and readable and pragmatic, more than artistic) while trying to capture what he saw as the good things about shell languages.

And it's changed quite a bit since then, and there are many things I would say with the benefit of hindsight were clear missteps.

We all joke about the hard problems of computer science, but it seems to me that the hard problems of programming language design, specifically (and perhaps software engineering more generally?) include having good taste and figuring out what to do about reverse compatibility.

> I think the article nailed that Perl was just too hard to learn for the value it provided to survive. Python is not nearly as, erm, expressive as perl for working in that space, but it is much easier to learn

The use cases have also changed over time. Quite a lot of developers ended up on Windows (although that pendulum is perhaps shifting again) where the rules and expectations of "shell" are very different. To say nothing of e.g. web development; long gone are the days of "cgi-bin" everywhere.