I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s fair to say that Perls lack of retention for any sizable part of the modern web development ecosystem was down to it&#x27;s performance. Since the days of Apache 1.x Perl has had native C bindings for httpd via mod_perl, which unsurprisingly runs circles around FastCGI and the even slower standard CGI.<p>It&#x27;s also worth remembering that Ruby didn&#x27;t really take off as a major force for web development until around a decade ago - after Facebook was created - when the Rails framework was released. The reason I bring Ruby into the discussion is because Ruby&#x27;s performance is roughly on a par with Perl&#x27;s while having an arguably superior web framework (Rails) to Perl&#x27;s CGI or mod_perl modules.<p>As much as I love Perl (it&#x27;s genuinely one of my favourite languages), it really can be a complete pig to work with at times due to it&#x27;s tendency to encourage code golfing and the many counterintuitive language features that were presumably inspired from shell scripting &#x2F; awk. This weird and often unexpected complexity is what I think drove a lot of people away. PHP on the other hand, was purposely designed to be a simple language for web development. So while PHP did take some inspiration from Perl, it was more idiomatic to C than Perl was. Which meant it was an easier language for developers to adopt (also be in mind that ASP - which was predominantly VBScript - was heavily used and PHP was easier to adopt than Perl).<p>At least that&#x27;s how I remember things back when I used to develop in the 90s