My collection of Programming Books Which I Will Discard Before I Ever Move Them Again includes a book about CGI programming with the Korn shell. I am not making this up.

As you well know, back in the day when CGI was magic and server-side includes were amazing, there weren't a lot of options for server side programming. You had C, if you were a Unixy systems programmer and didn't mind doing string processing in C. You had Tcl, if you wanted to go the AOLserver route. You had whatever shell script you wanted, if you wanted to pipe and stream together Unixy commands. After a time, you even had server-side JavaScript, if you spent a lot of money on Netscape server products.

You also had Perl, which ran on just about every Unix under the sun and behaved the same way pretty much everywhere. Even if you couldn't rely on one Unix utility behaving the same on every Unix variant (unless you somehow managed to get the GNU tools installed), you could rely on Perl being just about everywhere. Better yet, it had a fair library of code being developed and published because people were sharing it.

In the early days, you might have to use a Perl fork to connect to an Oracle or a Sybase installation, but you even had that option. (Yeah, you could do that in C too, but that would be borrowing pain far beyond string handling in C.)

It's pretty easy to see why Perl ended up with a lot of that market. It fit that niche which hadn't previously existed, and there wasn't much competition. (Korn shell. Korn. Shell.)

The market expanded rapidly. Then the competition expanded rapidly because the market expanded rapidly. It's innumerate to suggest that the relative position of market share will remain the same or even grow when the market grows so rapidly and so much competition appears.

I used very, very poor wording, and on re-reading what I wrote, it looks like I'm trying to say something I'm not.

When the market expands rapidly, but you share does not should have been when the market expands rapidly, but your users do not at a similar rate

My main point just being that Perl has less relevance to this market than it did before. This is obvious and expected with much more competition. On the other hand, it wasn't a foregone conclusion that Perl would cede a high position of relevance (if not the top position) once the competition heated up, which it has. I think that's important and it's useful to recognize that (as obvious as it may be to some) so we don't become complacent by falling back on platitudes of "we are growing, so everything is okay". We've lost a lot, and I still want that to be a motivator for doing great things and telling people about them.