One of Perl’s strongest selling point was web application, especially CGI. Perl was an early starter and obviously easily gained dominant position. Now once other languages started to challenge Perl and put pressure on Perl, it is very normal to see Perl lose portion of its pie.

Everything faces challenges, just like everybody faces. The invention of J2EE’s MVC model made people quickly realized that pure CGI is not a very good architecture, but after a while, now people realized that J2EE is way too slow.

I have part of my own web server written in Perl CGI, part in Java MVC model. I have to tell you that Perl CGI is way faster, but less maintainable.

But Perl is a general tool that supports rapid development very well, so I don’t think its lost in one area will lead to the fading away of the language itself.