In the mid-90's working at a start-up we got into a quiet time, at that point I was getting into doing web pages and had gotten past the joys of writing HTML in Notepad. I wanted more, and started looking at CGI stuff, so I started learning Perl to understand how I could get CGI to work correctly. After awhile I started using it for help in testing, connecting to databases, scrubbing data, system calls and other things. Whenever I have a lot of data to munge I use Perl to do it, but I have since moved off into Python and Ruby for some other tasks but there is still a lot of Perl that I handle day to day.