Perl’s lunch was eaten more by Ruby IMO. The bifurcation happened as the Perl programmers that wanted a more traditional OOP system picked up Ruby and the folks writing Bash++ oftentimes went to Python. These days it seems like Ruby is where Perl was in 2010.
That's probably because Rails hits the sweet spot. It's just complex enough to support a medium-sized website well. Most innovations since Rails have targeted high-load websites.
