perl came out early enough before the flood
  it was pretty much the CGI language by default
  it would crop up in a project and glue everything together
  at that point in the project when nobody cares anyway
  it was on my iBook in 2001 when PHP and Python were not
  it flew out of my keyboard rewriting a lost dot-com era PHP game  
  the $a and $b global variables are accumulators to paint with