Perl 4 was a great upgrade to bash as a scripting language. Perl 5 added a bunch of complexity to remake Perl into a programming language. It failed.
Perl 4 was a great scripting language whereas Perl 5 was a terrible programing language. Perl 5 lost to the better (dynamic) programming languages and bash reclaimed the scripting title as Perl 4 was dead.
I came to Perl when Perl 4 was the latest.
I was using it as a frame work for distributed computing, moving data between machines.
I was on the point of throwing it all away for C++ when Perl5 came out.
I forget the details, but it made everything possible, and did not get in my way like Perl 4 did.