I think it was more than a gimmick. It scaled down brilliantly. For people who mastered it, it was an incredibly powerful command-line tool, and it worked wel

I think it was more than a gimmick. It scaled down brilliantly. For people who mastered it, it was an incredibly powerful command-line tool, and it worked well enough for small scripts. It scaled up horribly. It showed its weaknesses in larger scripts, and it was gratuitously bad at any scale above that. And of course, as a bundle of idioms with no surface coherence and no unifying logical principles, it was grotesquely hostile to anyone who had not spent a lot of time immersed in it. But as a tool for command-line wizardry and small-scale scripting, for tasks that didn't need to be shared or maintained outside the priesthood of sysadmins, it was brilliant, and it hasn't been bested or even equaled as far as I know. I think the only reason it fell out of favor is that you can never be sure that a task won't grow beyond this little realm where Perl shines.