Amen brother. Started on Perl 4 on Sun BSD. Perl made me walk on water. Interest was so strong in the company we used to pay guys like Randal and Tom to come speak. I've bailed my employers out of countless binds with the well-timed perl script. I totally agree with you that Perl 5 was the beginning of the end. It moved perl from the realm of the shell programmer to the domain of the academic. I remember the usenet posts of the time becoming focused on computer science language design goals like closures rather than real world problems. Yes, you can write OO programs in perl, if you remember all the details and you are very consistent in your style. But it requires too much expertise. It became too much of an investment. Now, as you say, the train left the station while perl was deciding on its next destination. No way can I sell Perl to an employer now, despite the fact that it is often the quickest way out of a problem. Python is it, with its error prone indenting, inconsistent syntax, and bewildering (or lack of) type conversions. Been fun venting.

The problem with TCL is that it is a single pass parser, not a normal expression (recursive descent) parser like other languages. This makes it the programmers job to worry about interpolation. A real pain, getting all the evals right. Just like shell programming, but then I work with people who love KSH, bash, etc. I've never understood that masochistic behavior.