I spent a summer at a semiconductor company whose scripting language of choice was Perl. Truly, what the fuck…
Wall is a linguist, which influenced several of his design choices. You have a wide variety of expressing what you want in perl, just as with natural languages - some ways are maybe a bit harder to read for newcomers, while others are not worse than something like python. Typically you’d have coding guides for projects.
I did a webchat in perl in the 90s, and eventually rewrote it in php3 - php was easier to manage properly isolated between users than perl via the CGI interface, so it became popular with hosters very quickly. I went back to doing all my web scripting in perl once I started hosting my own servers,though.
Perl I believe is where the programming adage of TMTOWTDI comes from — There’s More Than One Way To Do It. Python was an anathema to that ideal, where TOOWTDI — There’s Only One Way To Do It, or at least one ideal way
