1) Because it was a better Perl. 2) The single CPU speed was doubling every 18 months almost. Wait a few years, stick the program a new Pentium III or whatever

1) Because it was a better Perl. 2) The single CPU speed was doubling every 18 months almost. Wait a few years, stick the program a new Pentium III or whatever and you got a nice speed boost. 3) Batteries included. It was huge quality of life improvement. Want to traverse directories, parse ini files, send emails, socket programming, even edit audio files —- it was all there. 4) Repl. Huge improvement over other existing popular languages at the time. Especially when ipython came about. 5) No curly braces. People were sick of Java and C++ verbose syntax. They were seen as old and crusty by that time so they wanted something new. “Why do I need 30 lines of code to open and read a file?”.