And the whole culture around CPAN, too, with the likes of Module::Build and Test::Harness and the strong expectations around POD documents. Nothing like that existed for the other scripting languages of the time.

There was a well-trodden path from writing a hacky one-off script to deal with a specific task, to realising "hey! this might be useful for others too!" and trying to make it a bit more generic, to checking in with your local Perl Mongers for advice, to turning it into a well-tested, well-documented CPAN module.

That was the route I followed as an early-career sysadmin in the dying days of the dotcom boom - it helped me take on much more of an "engineering" mindset, and was an important foundation for my later career.

I can't have written more than a few dozen lines of Perl in the last 15 years, but do I owe that community and culture a lot.