Comment by jerf

"I thought it was just running some scripts."

Ah, how times change.

Perl was the original practical back-end development language for the web. There's a bit of opinion in that, but not a lot; there's not a lot of other contenders, unless you count writing raw C CGI programs which was never that popular.

Perl performance isn't great, but then I don't consider TS/JS performance all that good either. Perl is a cut below JS nowadays because of the JIT that JS has but it's not impractically slow. If it wasn't impractically slow in literally the late 1990s, when it was powering nearly every dynamic site that existed, it sure isn't today.