If everyone start wearing pink this year, that's a fad. A fad has nothing to do with when the stuff was invented. It only has to do with people choosing it from the dominant reason being other people chooses it.
> Sucess of python is a testament to the difference a simple and beginner-friendly syntax can make as well as the "batteries-included" paradigm.
So why Python didn't succeed when Perl dominated? As you said, Python was around for quite a while then. "Simple", "beginner-friendly", "batteries-included" are all subjective terms that none of them I think is true compared to Perl. That mostly comes from one's background and culture, not worth to debate.
> the fact that Perl code is compatible with that 20 years before makes no difference as they have such bad readability
Writing Perl the way one writes shell scripts is what gets Perl's write-only rep. Do not write scripts the way we write shell scripts. Write scripts the way we write code -- That is my motivation to replace shell scripts with Perl.
There is no easy way to write readable shell scripts. Perl has all the language features that enables writing readable code. Using bad practitioner as argument for bad language is a bad logic. But if all you saw were bad practitioners (or more likely today, one haven't seen real practitioners by hears about the bad rep and see some bad relics), then it's hard to convince you. Perl has formatter. Perl has strict mode (that should be default). Perl has best practices. The people still using Perl today knows this. People who claim Perl is unreadable are getting that from the 90s.
