I cannot help but notice that Perl used to be very popular in early web development, sys administration, and in a a row of scientific fields. And lots of people were enthusiastic about it (as witnessed by CPAN content). Then it was declared unsuitable for teaching (many ways to do everything), and the next gen who started with Python usually claim that Perl is bad, while among older generation who matured cooking Perl scripts you still can hear that Python is nothing more than a less flexible, less expressive Perl's bastard child. So yes, I think, education (and the first usable programming language learned in particular) influence popularity very much.