I agree with your point but not the scare quotes. Yes, the field evolves, priorities change, and languages inevitably fall out of favor. However, that losing is inevitable doesn't make the losing less real, and I think it's still very useful to think about why a language fell out of favor. What changes in priority left the language behind? What could have made it more adaptive? What does that say about current programming trends? In 2020, we may well have a "Why Python Didn't Win" article, and I'll really want to read it.
>>What changes in priority left the language behind?
I'm not an expert but let me try. The most common of all is abstraction level at which problems are looked increase with time. Once the problems you solve get complicated increasingly over time, you run into a situation where your tools have to provide syntax and semantics to deal with that. While the previous complicated things get trivial and easier to deal with.
There fore your language has to evolve/grow. This is a double edged sword. If you wish to move ahead and break backwards compatibility to do this, you risk fragmenting the whole ecosystem for very little real benefit(Python 2 - 3 problem). You can keep two system in parallel, plan to support the existing for as long as you can while you work on the new stuff(The Perl 6 Problem). Large changes are difficult to make. Or just stay stagnant and become irrelevant(History if full of such languages). Java is rapidly becoming one such language. Its old, trivial things demand too much code and improvements look like bloat.
In the mean while newer languages which have a clean slate to start with come around and stick for a while. Eventually they must face the same problems.
Have you used Java recently? The last few versions are showing consistent improvement with lambas, date library etc. I can't think of this happening successfully in other languages but it seems to be working well in Java. Also JavaEE and Spring framework have improved massively and the amount of code (and configuration) to do stuff is reducing all the time - much more in the style of rails/django.
I think Java (and C#) will be here for a long while where the enterprise jobs are. Javascript will continue to be popular as long as it's the only real choice in the browser. After that - who knows?
Perl is actually no different. There are a lot of cool things happening in the Perl universe too. But the problem is, the older issues persist. There is a big legacy baggage to carry, and in the overalls the feature adoption is generally slow.
