I think in large part it's because Perl's formative years predate the blog revolution. Ruby, PHP and Java existed during Perl's ascendency, but they were in a

I think in large part it's because Perl's formative years predate the blog revolution. Ruby, PHP and Java existed during Perl's ascendency, but they were in a gestational phase. When Ruby broke into the mainstream US programming culture was when blogging was at its height, and the open source advocacy culture that coalesced around Ruby on Rails became the new template. It was such a powerful influence that it even rubbed off on existing stacks like Java and .NET to some degree—these corporate-driven platforms actually needed a good dose of the simplicity and pragmatism that Rails and PHP were peddling. But for Perl they already had all the pragmatism, along with much better tools, and an established culture, so it probably seemed they had little to learn from the open source communities of the aughts. If there's one thing that really hurt Perl in this new environment it was the unapproachability of Perl. It is clearly of an earlier era when it was taken for granted that programming was difficult and powerful tools with steep learning curves were favored. When I turned 18 in 1996 Perl really piqued my curiosity and I aspired to learn it, but what actually stuck was PHP simply because I was shipping so much faster. The whole second system syndrome with Perl 6 obviously didn't help either, but I think that's secondary to the poor on-boarding and general newbie-friendliness of the whole ecosystem.