We had this system that mailed a lot of quality reports on chemical samples to a bunch of different people. Maintenance of the mailing lists and the like was a pain and mail servers were sometimes unreliable.

A customer asked if the reports could be put on a website. I thought about it for a few minutes and realized that I could dump the reports into directories, formatted with links for a lot of the interesting information to cross reference them and index pages to bring up various views of interest to various communities. It was just a data reformatting problem, no CGI was required.

It was a huge hit and it took me practically no time to put together.

The fact that Perl was working on OpenVMS was a big part of the win here. Perl is ubiquitous, still. Today, I do Unix and it's installed on every one of our Unix systems by default. That's not true of any other scripting langauge and I don't see that changing.

I wonder if that Perl6 will ever enjoy that kind of penetration, no matter how perfect it is.