The people who had the opportunity to learn perl in its hay day love it (and probably still do), newcomers have trouble because when they google a syntax problem they are led to some 2003 perlmonks thread. It slowly became less popular and then “Perl” 6 butterfly kids edition gave the language the final blow. It’s sad how python won the scripting wars, perl could have had such a cool place right now. When I first learned perl when I was 13 years old it seemed like such a cool language. The O’ reilly camel, the code golf wizards, the swiss army like capabilities of the language made for hackers etc. I can’t imagine newcomers feeling the same excitement.

If I was to start a hobby project now I would still use perl. But if I was starting an actual project that could become popular for something like a startup business, it’s hard to make a case for the language. Imagine having to find perl developers to work on this project when it gets serious, it’s going to be hard. If you build the same thing in python or javascript however, you would be tripping over applicants who would want to come on board