"It means that Perl is used in a lot of unexpected places, and that a lot of critical things are "held together" by Perl. Even if you think your website is runn

"It means that Perl is used in a lot of unexpected places, and that a lot of critical things are "held together" by Perl. Even if you think your website is running on Java, some systems administrator probably has a cronjob written in Perl critical to its operation." In the above sentence replace Perl with C/C++/awk/lua/Python/Ruby/almost-any-language and it makes as much sense. Which is probably another indicator that there is nothing particularly perl specific about "holding together the internet". If anything "holds together the internet" it is the (language independent) protocols that do it.