What has been changed? Perl is now much less loved. Check your local book store, how many php books they have and how many Perl?

Oh c'mon! "Loved"... by whom? And judging by what? Books? Are you serious? Isn't the situation the same with fictional literature or other areas? If you judge from the availability in bookstores and from the data about sales you would infer that classics are much less loved than "bestselling" trash literature! Well, they probably are. Yet trash is trash and classics will stand up in the course of centuries. I am concerned about people being driven into being idiots with a very low level average culture. In the world of programming languages, on a smaller scale, it's just the same: people tend to be driven into thinking that inferior tools are in fact superior because they can be used to get fast results out of their inferior know how. But technology is not that smart yet to fully compensate for severe wetware shortcomings. Perhaps in some centuries, and even then... will it be a good thing?!? I prefer a slightly less loved tool that will allow me to make use of its full expressive power, for one.

Just the other day I mentioned LaTeX: I haven't checked for sure, but I bet there are tons more manuals and books for M$ wordmanglers and the like than for it, although there are a few good and very well known ones indeed. Despite there being, I'm sure they won't be likely to be readily available in the average bookstore, even if it has a large IT section. So... should I be bothered that LaTeX is much less loved than some toy tool that lets me conjure up toy docs in a mouse driven manner? (And that will encourage people not to make use of any sophisticated feature "accidentally" slipped in, in favour of repeatedly pressing the return key as on a mechanical typewriter.) I only know that had I tried to write my thesis with one, first or later I would have suddenly died by deflagrating orchitis, and gone nowhere near to ever complete it let alone make it even slightly resemble a decently typeset book. OTOH wordprocessors are good for... what they are good for: should I have to write an "ATTENTION" piece of paper for a freshly painted seat, I would probably fire up one. Similarly I use Perl routinely and I don't develop websites with it: I know where to look should I choose to. And I'm not the very least disturbed by the fact that a teenager will create a seemingly fancy one in shorter time with PHP.