Perl tended to follow rather than lead which is why it lost to its competitors - first PHP, then Ruby and Python. For example, Ruby had its own server interface

Perl tended to follow rather than lead which is why it lost to its competitors - first PHP, then Ruby and Python. For example, Ruby had its own server interface - Rack - long before Tatsuhiko Miyagawa developed a version for Perl called the Perl Server Gateway Interface (PSGI) upon which Plack was built but Ruby was off to the races with Rails by then.