This seems like a very unfair comparison. There were lots of nice compiled languages in 1987-- Borland Turbo Pascal, their C, gcc on workstations and so forth.

This seems like a very unfair comparison. There were lots of nice compiled languages in 1987-- Borland Turbo Pascal, their C, gcc on workstations and so forth. Yeah, a lot of people programmed in BASIC, but then a lot of people program in Scratch now, or something like that. To compare BASIC to PERL is really cherry picking.