There are many valid perspectives and issues on the decline of Perl, many of which are valid, but I'll add my own about the perceptions (as an ancient Perl code

There are many valid perspectives and issues on the decline of Perl, many of which are valid, but I'll add my own about the perceptions (as an ancient Perl coder who has mostly moved on) of Perl code being pretty messy and unmaintainable on average: I think Perl has always been an artist's tool, rather than an industrial tool, and this is why so much Perl code in the world is a relatively-unreadable mess. It grants great artistic license (which was also the name of its software license!) to the coder, as evinced by the Perl community motto TIMTOWTDI ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_more_than_one_way_to_do_it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_more_than_one_way_to... ). In the hands of an expert working on a labor of love, flexible artistic tooling allow maximal freedom and craftsmanship to create truly great things. But in the hands of novices, or even experienced professionals who are tasked with just getting something functional done on a deadline, there's little in the way of guardrails pushing the solution towards elegance, simplicity, and readability. Most coding work that is ever done is more industrial and task-focused in nature, and artistic tools aren't always really the right tools for that job. By way of analogy: Let's say in an industrial setting a manager decides that a new, large, safety warning placard needs to be created to warn employees about slipping on the wet floor of the factory. The manager could task an employee to go pick a standard "Wet Floor" sign from a catalog and order it, or she could decide we need a custom message and ask someone to contract with a signage company, or even in a pinch she could decide to hand someone a big square of plastic, some white paint, and a set of letter stencils to go make a sign with. She might even cite some ANSI standards the sign has to comply with about font sizes and colors for warning signs of this nature. What she'd never rationally do in this scenario, is just hand them a gift card to an art supply house and a tab of acid and tell them to go be creative, which is probably the closest thing to the Perl way to go about the problem. Nonetheless, Perl has value and merit, and is a beautiful thing.