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Once upon a time, Bugzilla was an internal application at Netscape, written in TCL. When it was open-sourced in 1998, Terry (the original programmer), decided to re-write Bugzilla in Perl. My understanding is that he re-wrote it in Perl because a lot of system administrators know Perl, so that would make it easier to get contributors. In 1998, there were few advanced, object-oriented web scripting languages. In fact, Perl was pretty much it. PHP was at version 3.0, python was at version 1.5, Java was just starting to become well-known, ruby was almost unheard of, and some people were still writing their CGI scripts in C or C++. Perl has many great features, most of all the number of libraries available and the extreme flexibility of the language. However, Perl would not be my first choice for writing or maintaining a large project, such as Bugzilla. The same flexibility that makes Perl so powerful makes it very difficult to enforce code quality standards or to implement modern object-oriented designs.