Along with the other excellent answers, one thing Perl never got was a faster runtime. This drove me into the arms of V8 (via Node.js).
Ruby got jRuby and Rubinius, PHP got the excellent work Facebook did, Python got PyPy, and many cool languages started to appear on the JVM.
Perl got stuck with /usr/bin/perl.
Having said that, the internals of Perl continue to improve in the current interpreter, and there's some long standing amazing work such as the incredible performance of the DBI drivers (look at the techempower benchmarks to see how well Perl shines even versus Node.js when it comes to database access).
I still use Perl for small scripts, but I'm just not building anything big in it these days. Perl6 was a huge lost opportunity, and a massive failure in vision and leadership.
Ruby got jRuby and Rubinius, PHP got the excellent work Facebook did, Python got PyPy, and many cool languages started to appear on the JVM.
Perl got stuck with /usr/bin/perl.
Having said that, the internals of Perl continue to improve in the current interpreter, and there's some long standing amazing work such as the incredible performance of the DBI drivers (look at the techempower benchmarks to see how well Perl shines even versus Node.js when it comes to database access).
I still use Perl for small scripts, but I'm just not building anything big in it these days. Perl6 was a huge lost opportunity, and a massive failure in vision and leadership.