>It's become a trend in the industry to let superficial attitudes shape popular opinion. Well, yeah. Popular opinion is always a trend, and it always follows s

>It's become a trend in the industry to let superficial attitudes shape popular opinion. Well, yeah. Popular opinion is always a trend, and it always follows superficial attitudes. That's basically a tautology. The question is why do you care? Why complain about being unpopular if you don't want to follow trends? If Perl were popular, it would be just as trendy to praise it. And just as counter-trendy to denounce it as over-sold. People have perfectly rational reasons to use languages that are popular. If Perl is not popular, it has to offer something else. Is it as fast as C? As portable as JavaScript? As flexible as C++? As well-funded as Java? As easy to use as Python? These 'popular' languages are also heavily criticized. JavaScript could be the worst language in the world, and it would survive all that criticism because browser compatibility is important. What does Perl offer? Look at the landing page at https://www.perl.org/ https://www.perl.org/ "It's old and does stuff! That's why we love it!" Who cares about that? The language basically bills itself with no more than "This is a programming language, but with different syntax!"