"Stroustrup campaigned for years and years and years, way beyond any sort of technical contributions he made to the language, to get it adopted and used. And he sort of ran all the standards committees with a whip and a chair. And he said 'no' to no one. He put every feature in that language that ever existed. It wasn’t cleanly designed—it was just the union of everything that came along. And I think it suffered drastically from that." (from Coders at Work)
We just got done hearing about how PHP's early years included "official" abstention from frameworky things (http://codefury.net/2011/04/why-php-was-a-ghetto/). PHP "won" because of distribution, just like Javascript is "winning" now.
While Perl is an eclectic language and has the kitchen-sink nature, the only thing it really bolted on without much forethought was its object system, which it borrowed from circa-1994 Python. Unfortunately for Perl, this wasn't just bolted on (bad in and of itself), but was also a bad object system, which is a nasty flaw; Python had a much smaller user base and was able to transition from its old-style classes to much better new-style classes without a horrible hubbub, but Perl's much larger userbase (at the time) made it very difficult to switch to something better, which the community mostly only got around to in the last two years (incidentally, Perl's much better replacement for its old object system was by and large another borrowing, this time from Common Lisp).
