I wrote a lot of Perl in the first dotcom era and was very happy to switch to Python and Ruby as soon as I had a chance. There were some nice things about Perl

I wrote a lot of Perl in the first dotcom era and was very happy to switch to Python and Ruby as soon as I had a chance. There were some nice things about Perl but it was just too hard to maintain a large, active perl codebase with multiple engineers making commits. Perl coasted along for a long time on the momentum of CPAN but it wasn't enough. I think the C++ analogy makes sense. How many programmers entering the field today are choosing to learn C++ when they have so many other choices without all of C++'s baroque complexity and footguns?