What about security? Is there a safe enough way to still use it today ?
Perl -T helps ensure there’s no tainting of variables - you take the parameter that’s passed and regex pull out the matching pattern you need to use. If your variable is a match of ([\d]+) then it’s only going to have numbers in, and you can use it fairly safely
There's an entire industry, probably worth hundreds of billions of dollars, built around trying to detect insecure code and force it to be less insecure. Meanwhile, this one old language that nobody uses has a single option you enable to be [more] secure by default. And I'll bet you a billion dollars the reason other languages don't have it is "the design doesn't look very clean".
The problem was that the newbies writing cgi scripts in 1993 generally did not have much experience with input sanitation and had very few libraries to lean on to do it for them.