This suggestion came up years ago The consensus was that Larry Wall already found an unambiguous name with no collisions with other languages Why fix what isn t broken It is possible that Perl became less of the duct tape of the internet because of JavaScript But it is hardly causal that the article name caused any lessening of the usage of Perl I notice that JavaScript is coming up against its own walls of deployability understandability at LOC in the millions which is another possible factor in this phenomenon It is more likely that other languages took notice of the successes of Perl and took the language features they could implement viz regular expressions closures here documents etc which then affected the usage of Perl But the other languages are also experiencing their own problems limitations So it s a two way street