Perl was my introduction to web programming in the 90s, and then I moved onto python and php.
Perl’s alien syntax and how there were multiple competing “best practices” put off newcomers and made it difficult to code review.
Perl also stagnated for quite some time due to the efforts to move to Perl 6, though python likewise stalled later it already had better traction at that point.
However I’d argue that Perl lost to PHP at least as much as it lost to python. PHP was revolutionary at the time for how easy and straightforward it was to do simple web programming which was one of the big use cases for Perl.
By the early 2010s there wasn't much of any use case that made sense to choose Perl. Sysadmin scripting was clearer to review and maintain in python and golang, web applications moved to php and frameworks written in languages that didn’t have the downsides of Perl.
Perl’s alien syntax and how there were multiple competing “best practices” put off newcomers and made it difficult to code review.
Perl also stagnated for quite some time due to the efforts to move to Perl 6, though python likewise stalled later it already had better traction at that point.
However I’d argue that Perl lost to PHP at least as much as it lost to python. PHP was revolutionary at the time for how easy and straightforward it was to do simple web programming which was one of the big use cases for Perl.
By the early 2010s there wasn't much of any use case that made sense to choose Perl. Sysadmin scripting was clearer to review and maintain in python and golang, web applications moved to php and frameworks written in languages that didn’t have the downsides of Perl.