According to the Discourse, somebody killed perl
There's been a flurry of discussion on Hacker News and other tech forums about what killed Perl. I wrote a lot of Perl in the mid 90s and subsequently worked on some of the most trafficked sites on the web in mod_perl in the early 2000s, so I have some thoughts. My take: it was mostly baked into the culture. Perl grew amongst a reactionary community with conservative values, which prevented it from evolving into a mature general purpose language ecosystem. Everything else filled the gap.
I remember Perl
Something to keep in mind, is that although this is my personal take, and therefore entirely an opinion piece, I was there at the time. I stopped doing Perl properly when I left Amazon, I think this would have been around 2005. It's based on the first hand impressions of somebody who was very deeply involved in Perl in its heyday, and moved on. I have a lot of experience, from both inside and outside the tent.
Perl's roots are sysadmin
What culture? Perl always had a significant amount of what you might call "BOFH" culture, which came from its old UNIX sysadmin roots. All of those passive aggressive idioms and in jokes like "RTFM", "lusers", "wizards", "asking for help the wrong way" etc. None of this is literally serious, but it does encode and inform social norms that are essentially tribal and introverted. There implicitly is a privileged population, with a cost of entry to join. Dues must be paid. Cultural conservatism as a first principle.
This stems from the old locked-down data centre command culture. When computer resource was expensive, centralised, fragile, and manually operated, it was rigidly maintained by gatekeepers, defending against inappropriate use. I started my career as an apprentice programmer at the very end of this era, (late 80s) pre-web, and before microcomputers had made much inroads, and this really was the prevailing view from inside the fort. (This is a drawback about fort-building. Once you live in a fort, it's slightly too easy to develop a siege mentality). Computers are special, users are inconvenient, disruption is the main enemy.
An unfortunate feedback loop in this kind of "perilous" environment is that it easily turns prideful. It's difficult to thrive here, if you survive and do well you are skilled; you've performed feats; you should mark your rites of passage. This can become a dangerous culture trap. If you're not careful about it, you may start to think of the hazards and difficulties, the "foot guns", as necessary features - they teach you those essential survival skills that mark you out. More unkindly, they keep the stupid folk out, and help preserve the high status of those who survived long enough to be assimilated. Uh-oh, now you've invented class politics.
The problem with this thinking is that it's self-reinforcing. Working hard to master system complexities was genuinely rewarding - you really were doing difficult things and doing them well. This is actually the same mechanism behind what eventually became known as 'meritocracy'1, but the core point is simpler - if difficulty itself becomes a badge of honour, you've created a trap: anything that makes the system more approachable starts to feel like it's cheapening what you achieved. You become invested in preserving the barriers you overcame.
(This is the same mentality that built leetcode interview pipelines BTW, but let's leave that sidebar alone for now)
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