It has always been a well-known fact that the founding fathers of Perl had only a passing interest in all things web.
It shouldn't be completely surprising, because of this, other technologies have slowly displaced the language. For the longest time, if you went to #perl on IRC, you'd get booted for asking web-related questions.
I still contend that one of the smartest moves ever -- was for the PHP boys to make their language "just work" on millions of web servers. I still feel pain from my early days of trying to debug Perl via CGI.
> I still feel pain from my early days of trying to debug Perl via CGI.
At Linuxcare, we used mod_perl. That made CGI look like a walk in the park... I remember one weekend where there were incompatible versions of everything that we were trying to sort out to get things back on line... shudder.
I wonder how communities go from "a few of the founding members don't really care about X" to "if you mention X on the channel you'll get booted". That seems like a huge and disturbing jump in fanaticism, and a decrease in popularity is well deserved if they really have that mentality.
Well, not really. I guess they got sick of the same how do I write a CGI? questions again and again.
Perl was popular for the web for one reason and one reason only: It was the only dynamic interpreted language that was widely available, and it was widely available for the simple reason that your sysadmins had already installed it for their own use. Back in the early-mid 90s, you got C, C++ (maybe) and FORTRAN compilers on the typical institutionally-owned (university or corporate) large, Internet-connected Unix box. The choices for any ordinary user wanting to put something dynamic on the web were, umm, C and that's about it, or Perl. Lots of people got into Perl just for CGI like nowadays they get into Ruby just for Rails (or Tcl just for Tk).
Perl had "better" regexp handling, certainly. But several major products such as AOLServer and CNET's StoryServer (which they later spun off into a separate company) were Tcl-based. Joe Hacker running a website out of his home directory at college wouldn't have seen them but Tcl was once a huge presence on high-traffic websites.
Incidentally back then Tcl was only really a presence on Sun kit... Perl was already everywhere.
One area where Tcl missed out was in terms of web servers. There were a number of proprietary ones that integrated Tcl as a server-side language (sort of like PHP), which, of course, is a much higher performing model than launching a CGI for each request. However, by the time those servers were open sourced (AOLServer), the PHP cat was out of the bag.
Hrm. I was going to respond and say that I didn't think it registered on enough of the metrics I use, but I went and checked and it does get hits on Amazon, Freshmeat, and even a few job postings on Craigslist. I guess I should consider it.
By the way, while we're on the subject, what do people think of adding ColdFusion? It's sort of a weird hybrid... yeah it's a language, but it appears to me to be even more web specific than PHP. Does it even have a standalone interpreter of some kind? I really don't know that much about it.
It shouldn't be completely surprising, because of this, other technologies have slowly displaced the language. For the longest time, if you went to #perl on IRC, you'd get booted for asking web-related questions.
I still contend that one of the smartest moves ever -- was for the PHP boys to make their language "just work" on millions of web servers. I still feel pain from my early days of trying to debug Perl via CGI.