Perl exploded because it was the easiest, richest ecosystem available to plug into CGI and the web.
PHP & Ruby & Python then collectively covered the same waterfront whether you wanted “easy” or “fun” or “simple”.
And I would propose that PHP attracting the developer cohort who wanted “easy” and Ruby/Rails attracting the developer cohort who wanted “fun” were each individually more damaging to the Perl ecosystem than Python.
Perl exploded because it was the easiest, richest ecosystem available to plug into CGI and the web.
PHP & Ruby & Python then collectively covered the same waterfront whether you wanted “easy” or “fun” or “simple”.
And I would propose that PHP attracting the developer cohort who wanted “easy” and Ruby/Rails attracting the developer cohort who wanted “fun” were each individually more damaging to the Perl ecosystem than Python.