Yes, there was a ton of Perl in the early days. This came about because Paul Davis was a Perl aficionado and did a lot of script writing with it early on, and the non-programmers, of which there were n-2, could pick it up much more easily than C (of course). Which is how some of them became programmers. Incidentally, we used C, not C++, though I liked OOP, because I had previously had less than great experience using C++ on large projects. We used a C++ compiler though because it could catch more errors than the C compiler could. This is one area where Steve Yegge was a bit off in that famous post.