Exactly my thought regarding the need to evolve as a language. Perl is mostly dead because it didn't keep up with the times and I say that as a person who spent a tremendous amount of time learning and using Perl. The Schwartzarian transform was a beautiful thing to behold.
Perl is born to solve portability and limitation problems of shells (csh, sh, ksh*), awk and sed. People who do not live on the command line can not appreciate the power of perl.
Huh. I guess it's one of those cases where once you have a thing, you wonder how you could have gone 20 years without it. :) Although, to be fair, I only started working with Perl (beyond one-liners on the shell) in 2012.
