I spent some time in the late 90s struggling with picking up perl for ye olde cgi-bin. It was definitely harder to grok then most, I think if you come up from t

I spent some time in the late 90s struggling with picking up perl for ye olde cgi-bin. It was definitely harder to grok then most, I think if you come up from the shell at that time with a large familiarity with awk and sed it was easier to grok. I think it quickly fell down when it became the way to do dynamic web applications for which it wasn’t really suited. As horrible as php was (then) from a language perspective it’s purpose built nature, made it way easier for early web uses. It did a good job of solving one problem and stayed in its lane. It’s interesting that it seems, for the most part, that Ruby was mostly relegated to it’s use in Rails. It was probably one of the easiest and most intuitive languages I’ve picked up (I never got into python) and it quickly became my defacto scripting language though now I pretty much just use node since JavaScript is my day to day and I'm so familiar with the ecosystem.