[exploderate]

I used Perl for LAMP apps in the 90ties. Perl lost webdev to PHP (some Ruby) and science stuff to Python. Fans of OOP/functional style programming went to Ruby.

System administration never fully replaced awk/sed/bash with Perl and the new wave was all configuration management, like chef and puppet.

Python was considered to be a "clean", algol-style language, so universities started teaching it twenty years ago. Only logical after teaching Pascal for decades. Students kept using Python, so now there are lots of data science projects around.