A little extra history. Grad students get an office, and their office was in the kitchen area of a trailer across the street from CIS. They ran Yahoo off a computer in this area and the head sys admin worked hard to handle the bandwidth requirements because it was saturating the network and causing problems for other users sharing that segment. He found them a better home for hosting (I think it was DEC), but they got funded right before they moved so that never happened. Stanford was great at helping students do projects like this, which is quite different from many other universities. I remember the e-mail from someone else in the trailer asking them if it was ok to pack their stuff up because it was clear they were not coming back. Good times.
I used Perl a lot mid-90s, it's an amazing language. I don't really understand how it fell away from the internet while something like the abomination that is PHP succeeded. Just goes to show that the better solutions aren't always the winner.
Well anyone looking at Python and Perl side-by-side is gonna pick Python, and that's what happened. PHP had relatively little to do with it.
source: I worked at Yahoo in the early 2000s and I watched it happen.
For small/non-corporate developers, the common availability of mod_php in shared hosting setups was the main factor.
sure, but "back in the day", Perl was like that. Every hosting provider used to have perl cgi scripts as their default solution