I learned Perl in the mid 90s and it was a revelation. You could do so much with it so easily. But by the mid 00s I was working to phase it out whenever I saw i

I learned Perl in the mid 90s and it was a revelation. You could do so much with it so easily. But by the mid 00s I was working to phase it out whenever I saw it, because of several factors, some identified here already: * poor language support for building complex programs or data structures... it was possible but never easy. * the stdlib: compared to PHP, Python, and Ruby, Perl offered very little built-in, which means that the next item was even more critical: * CPAN: was extremely difficult to automate and extremely flaky compared to the alternatives, RubyGems in particular. And yes, Perl6, which for a long time prevented Perl5 updates entirely. They got past that, but it was too late. I think the uncertainty guaranteed no one was going to invest in pushing for the needed improvements to CPAN either (tho maybe they’ve happened, I haven’t even tried in a decade).