"But what about Perl? Till 2005 it was the most dominating scripting language in the world. In 2008 we said in an interview with Dr. Dobb's Journal that Perl would go extinct based on the trend we saw in the TIOBE index at that time. After this a religious war started with Perl diehards who claimed that this won't happen and that the TIOBE index was being gamed. Stevan Little gave a ground-breaking talk in 2013 called "Perl is not dead, it is a dead end" indicating that once software engineers leave the Perl language they will never come back. Personally I think that the fork of Perl 6 (and its delays for decades) together with the unclear future of what was going to happen to the language was the main reason for engineers to look for alternatives such as Python and Ruby. And still today the Perl community hasn't defined a clear future, and as a consequence, it is slowly fading away." -- TIOBE Index for April 2018 (retrieved on 2018-05-01)