I am not even going to pretend that I am Perl programmer. Perl gained popularity because of CGI. CGI has lost its popularity and Perl has gone back to what it was, a niche language.
Perl could have held on to its popularity had it been an easy language like PHP. The average person is not smart enough to handle everything Perl has to offer.
PHP is far less complicated. For the same reason, Visual Basic was/is popular and Java eventually has pushed out C++.