Perl was never the "default choice" for web apps on its merit as a language tho'. At the time (I was there) on a typical large institutional or corporate Unix box you had C/C++/FORTRAN compilers for the engineers to use and Perl installed by the sysadmins for their own use, and that was pretty much it for languages. Getting a whole new language installed for a project that wasn't even "official" was a non-starter. The path of least resistance was to use Perl for CGIs. If Unix sysadmins had been into REXX instead, then that would have been the default choice. Now that most Unixes ship with several scripting languages installed already, people are free(r) to choose. Perl was simply in the right place at the right time.
Yes, these days, people are free to choose. However, after trying the alternatives, I think Perl is still a winner.
I spent some time (maybe 6 months) with Python recently. The first few weeks you're amazed at how uniform and regular everything is. It's so simple! But then after you've gotten used to Python, it starts to wear on you that there's no shortcuts for things that you do n times / day. And it's not just that Perl saves you typing, it's that Perl doesn't annoy experienced programmers by making them do every single thing the uniform (and longer) way over and over.
Another thing is naming. There are various clumsily-named things in Python. For example, "dictionary"? It's a hash. "Tuple"? I don't blame Guido, because I don't believe he's a native speaker of the rat's nest we call the English language, but it almost appears that some things are named different from the Perl-equivalents just to be different. Anyway, what you find after having used both Python and Perl is that Perl really does have that smooth well-worn "I use this every day and it fits like a glove" feel, and a lot of that has to do with well-chosen names for things, and operators that look like what they do.
