I heard a fascinating theory a few years ago on the decline of Perl:
In the early aughts, Google SRE recruiting had such a strong, selective focus on A-player sysadmins with Perl expertise that it drained the market of top talent. Within google these people began to adopt, and eventually create and evangelize newer, Googlier programming languages.
In other words, Perl expertise was the skills filter, and Perl itself a technological ancestor of certain modern languages like Go.
In the early aughts, Google SRE recruiting had such a strong, selective focus on A-player sysadmins with Perl expertise that it drained the market of top talent. Within google these people began to adopt, and eventually create and evangelize newer, Googlier programming languages.
In other words, Perl expertise was the skills filter, and Perl itself a technological ancestor of certain modern languages like Go.