Nothing in Perl is groundbreaking in and of itself. But, Larry did manage to wrangle a number of language features and styles together and synthesize them into a language that, rather against the grain of minimalism and orthogonality, is big, somewhat messy, and incredibly useful. Not a language for the computer scientist, a language for the working programmer. The *groundbreaking* aspect isn't anything in the Perl language, but Larry's decision to *not* break new ground with yet another one-trick suburb or a cool new revitalizing Mall, and instead focused on gluing the infrastructure of the existing neighborhoods into something more livable. (how's that for stretching a metaphor?).