[qwertyuiop924]

1 man using perl can outpace 8 on C++. Who would've thought? /sarcasm. But seriously, I think this is one of the classic instances of what is now quite common knowledge about dynamic scripting languages: They let you get things done MUCH faster. I think the tools group learned the wrong lesson from this, but OTOH, who would want to start developing all of their new software in perl? And given that python hadn't caught on yet, there really wasn't much else out there in the field.

[ryao]

> there really wasn't much else out there in the field.

What about shell scripts?

[qwertyuiop924]

Shell scripts are even more miserable to write than perl, and are missing a lot of features you want for most applications

[jschwartzi]

Or LISP.

[qwertyuiop924]

Firstly, the mention of LISP would have probably sent most of Sun screaming and running for the hills at the time. Secondly, LISP has never been very good at OS integration, one of the most important things for many software projects.