I think a lot of it has to do with the language, when written very idiomatically, tends to rapidly become hard to maintain. Part of this perhaps is the history

I think a lot of it has to do with the language, when written very idiomatically, tends to rapidly become hard to maintain. Part of this perhaps is the history of Perl as a fantastic one-off tool language (I'm not a developer for my company, I have other responsibilities, but when we need a fast one-off tool for some data processing, the C++, C, Java, Python and Ruby guys all come to me to hack off something to just get the job done because I can do it in a few minutes vs their half a day). I've looked back at some of those one-offs, and for the life of me I can't tell what they are supposed to do. On the other hand, I have written some largish projects in Perl, and when I constrained myself to a very explicit dialect of the language (almost Javaish in verbosenss), I found it to run fast, and be highly maintainable. I cracked the code open to a 20k line project I wrote 4 years ago and was able to jump right in. In that respect it's a bit like C++ in that you can write code to be unreadable or you can write it to be readable if you constrain yourself to a non-idiomatic subset of the language. But unfortunately, the Perl community tried to embrace and open attitude towards this (there's more than one way to do things) that ultimately ended up embracing the "get it done now and in as few lines as possible" idiomatic unreadable code style. I think other than that, OO is an important factor, Perl's OO system was so hard to do right, and other languages OO just seemed to embedded and clean to work with, but also Perl has not really found itself (for some reason) in many embedded systems, in GUI programming, on client-side systems (e.g. Javascript), etc. all places where it could have done well, but for whatever reason just never found a good comfort zone the way it does for sysadmin type tasks (and a few very small domains like computational linguistics). The Perl community seems to have spent a decade endlessly spinning around the drain of supporting backend work, and never approached the more sexy applications of the language.