1995 was pretty much the very early days of perl5. perlhist points out that the official release of perl 5.000 was just over a year old: 1994-Oct-18.

My personal recollection (1995 was my own first year with Perl, so I recall it pretty distinctly), was that everybody at that time was still using perl4 for most tasks. References were the big unknown, OO in perl was even more distant. It tooks a few more years before perl5 became the norm.

n.b. I'd like to stress that that was my own impression, with rather limited exposure to the outside world of perl. It is well possible that other people had different experiences, in that era.