I used to be on many mailing lists and noted the decline of traffic long before the announcement of Perl 6. While you could argue that everything that could be

I used to be on many mailing lists and noted the decline of traffic long before the announcement of Perl 6. While you could argue that everything that could be asked had been asked, I do not know if I buy that. Stack Overflow suggests that there's a baseline of questions out there because new people are always arriving; I would then expect that mailing list question rate to level off at some trickle, but it completely stopped in some groups. Perl's readability is low, in my opinion, due to a few factors. First and most obvious is the reliance on, well, tons of symbols, resulting in the refrain "executable line noise." The second factor is the philosophy of there being more than one way to do it; this means that you have less local idiom in the language and so you have to spend more time guessing how this programmer did it. The third factor is what I would consider cultural: one-liners. The one-liner is an interesting exercise but it only proves how clever you are in writing the code for a very arbitrary restriction, the number of characters used, and the tradeoff is readability. Another big arc would be CPAN. So many modules, each covering a different eighty percent of what you needed to do. And heaven help you if you were on Windows for some odd reason because many of those modules needed a compiler, or at least the ones I came across did. The standard library was simply too anemic, and so you were left trying to find just the right package and hope you could work around its shortcomings instead of doing something obvious and getting on with your day. I do not buy into the network effect of the article. Perl was there before Python, and it was larger than Python for some time. Culturally, it was a ticking time bomb, waiting to be supplanted by a language that was not a write-once, read-never design. In a similar sense, PHP's culture assured its fast adoption and rise, but also would bring it an ugly reputation, which it still struggles with -- perhaps now unfairly!