1995 is when CPAN started (the first "real" module repository, and the unambiguous best one for a very long time), and yeah - Perl was enormously popular then a

1995 is when CPAN started (the first "real" module repository, and the unambiguous best one for a very long time), and yeah - Perl was enormously popular then and especially shortly after for "it's not bash and it's not C" purposes. PHP was still new and WordPress didn't yet exist, and Perl was (and is) consistently beating it by a wide margin in performance. For all the code-golf insanity that Perl supports, it's an extremely effective language with a truly stunning degree of both flexibility and performance.