Hardly. I don't see the necessity of history as it happened. Remember it didn't start out on the web anyway; I'm pretty certain there would have a been a lot of Perl, had a Unixoid system made it onto the desktop instead of Windows - even entirely without the web. There are far too many variables to reduce this all to a single equation.

Even if there hadn't been so far, consider the fates of LISP and Smalltalk - there was quite little of them so far. Regardless, awareness and - at least ideological - acceptance is growing. Likewise would probably have happened for Perl, had there been little of it to begin with.

Makeshifts last the longest.