A language that's "tailor-made" for the individual is fantastic when you only have to deal with your own code. You get to write stuff that makes sense to you. It doesn't matter if it's unconventional or doesn't make sense to anyone else -- it fits the way that your brain works.
But when cooperating on larger projects with lots of other people involved, this backfires remarkably. You now need to understand the way that half a dozen or more other brains work.
As software development has gradually shifted away from the published efforts of lone hackers and towards the collaborative efforts of teams of specialized people, Perl's "TMTOWTDI" approach has made it a far more expensive language to develop software in than all of the alternatives.
I feel like most scripting languages are pretty similar in terms of productivity based on my own experiences anyway...
As far as I know, nobody's done a comprehensive cost analysis of similar software built using different languages, methodologies, or architectures. Certainly nothing recent. I've harped on this before quite loudly and I think it's one of the reasons our industry can't be called "engineering".
People's individual experiences just don't make for good enough data because there are too many confounding variables.
The result was a language that has a lot of power and flexibility. People who like Perl tend to love it, because it fits like a tailor-made suit instead of all those off-the-rack languages. People who dislike Perl tend to hate it, because all that power and flexibility can be easily abused (even when you're trying not to — there's a reason so many people buy off the rack instead of making DIY suits).
•https://bigthink.com/videos/why-perl-is-like-a-human-languag...
•https://www.perl.com/pub/1999/03/pm.html/
•https://www.perl.com/pub/2007/12/06/soto-11.html/