You know, I'd post a comment on there but I always get that really useless "Your comment submission failed for the following reasons: Text entered was wrong. Try again."-shit.

Doesn't really paint a good picture of perl if something that simple already fails…

I don't know if perl is short of newbies. But if the source about not liking java as it was in 1997! then maybe they need to re-think about how to evaluate using a language in 2014!

The perl5 to perl6 development, together with the rise of python definitely did put a big dent in perl uptake. As well as perl's reputation for unmaintainable and non team workable cowboy code led a lot of users to drop it. Especially in the area of bioinformatics where it used to rule the roost.