> I guess I am more worried about the trajectory. Perl and Python (which really never did it for me) are pretty much the same age. However, Python has been going places (partly for the very reasons I dislike it) while Perl, even though it keeps hanging in there, has very few new users and uses.

The reasons behind this are discussed at length here, which identifies the key issue as:

to remain popular over time, a programming language must be compelling for new projects ... this is not solely a technical concern; it's a concern of the language community and ecosystem