> If Perl had worked harder to stay in the public eye in a good way (rather than being viewed as dieing), there wouldn't have been a perceived need for Python.
As I remember it, there was a concerted attack on perl with Python being held up as the-anti-perl. There wasn't (yet) any question of perl dieing. My take-- which I owe a lot to Steve Yegge's peculiar writings on the subject-- is that the computer science intelligensia were actively offended by that upstart outsider Larry Wall was showing you could do things differently and still come up with something useful.
