Comment by PaulHoule

Got a lot of bustedness though. I was writing cgi-bin scripts for Perl and I remember the urldecode in Perl being busted fundamentally, like it would rewrite '%20'-> SP but not rewrite '+' -> SP so I had to write my own urldecode.

My impression is that people use Python to do most of the things that we used to do with Perl.

Circa 2001 I wrote a cookie-based authentication system for the web which had an "authentication module" of roughly 100 lines that I wound up rewriting in at least ten different languages such as PHP, Java, Cold Fusion, Tango, etc. The OO Perl version was the shortest and my favorite.