I don't think there is a single reason, but it sure didn't help that the community self-destructed by trying to make an entirely new language after version 5 and still call it Perl. It took a lot of years to resolve that nonsense, and in the meantime many people moved on.
It also does not help that Perl is a creative language, useful but very much open to many different interpretations. Hiring a perl guy and expecting them to read someone else's code is a crapshoot. The upside to Python's strong cultural opinions on coding style makes it easier for one developer to pick up someone else's code.
> Imagine that the boom in ML/AI didn't happen - would Python be #1 language right now?
Probably not. But it wouldn't be perl, either. Javascript most likely. But the core usage of python for scripting was never predicated on ML popularity, so it would still be a pretty commonly used language. and javascript has many annoying warts too, so I think plenty of people would still choose to write django apps instead of node, whether ML existed or not.
I don't think there is a single reason, but it sure didn't help that the community self-destructed by trying to make an entirely new language after version 5 and still call it Perl. It took a lot of years to resolve that nonsense, and in the meantime many people moved on.
It also does not help that Perl is a creative language, useful but very much open to many different interpretations. Hiring a perl guy and expecting them to read someone else's code is a crapshoot. The upside to Python's strong cultural opinions on coding style makes it easier for one developer to pick up someone else's code.
> Imagine that the boom in ML/AI didn't happen - would Python be #1 language right now?
Probably not. But it wouldn't be perl, either. Javascript most likely. But the core usage of python for scripting was never predicated on ML popularity, so it would still be a pretty commonly used language. and javascript has many annoying warts too, so I think plenty of people would still choose to write django apps instead of node, whether ML existed or not.