Interview with Larry Wall
"Perl has always considered itself primarily a programmer-centric language, while Python has always considered itself to be more institution-centric. So in a sense it's a bit dumbed down, much like Java. You'll note both of those languages make their greatest appeal to managers. :-) "Huh?  I was using Python when Perl was more popular, and this seems completely fabricated.  He's trying to lump Python in with Java, which is bizarre because those 2 camps have pretty big philosophical differences.I think that the main reason that Python became more popular because it has both clearer syntax and clearer semantics than Perl.  It is compact AND readable -- not just compact.  The data structures in Python also behave more like those you would see in a CS textbook.I'm working on my own language, and I just read over the Camel Book ("Learning Perl").  Honestly I don't see much in there that I want to borrow, except maybe for ~= automatically introducing variables.  What else is good about Perl, which is    1) not in Python/Ruby/JavaScript (like hash tables)
    2) overly terse/clever?

(Honest question)Perl's regex syntax seems to be it's biggest influence and legacy, with Python/Ruby/Java/PCRE all adopting its syntax.And -e in Perl is also useful -- Python/Ruby/etc. aren't really good for one liners like Perl.  This provides a nice gateway into the language.But a lot of other features were rightly ignored by other languages IMO.Also, with regard to the previous sentence, I actually consider Python OO kind of weak, but it's definitely better than Perl's AFAICT.