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While confusion around P6 certainly hurt Perl, Python started to conquer over areas previously held by Perl even before that. AFAICT educational establishments didn't like Perl because it embraces expressivity. There's more then one way approach feels good once you grok it, but for the most teachers its anathema - it means you need to explain much more.

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Eh, kind of. Perl as a teaching language is obviously terrible, but on the other hand Python outside of academia is basically the DSL to call numpy. I think the problem is, more simply, competition. Now that Perl isn't the only reasonable dynamic language (you have ruby, python, nodejs...), people have more choices, and are ultimately just going to use what they already know as a 'plumbing' language.

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