The language and libraries situation on Windows wasn't great during this time.

Delphi was good but a compiled language with manual memory management. It was very easy to write code that crashed, which would nuke the user's state leaving little evidence of what happened. It also had a lot of legacy quirks like not allowing circular dependencies between compilation units, networking support was poor (iirc TCP, HTTP and other classes required you to buy a third party library). The VCL was a wrapper around Win32, which had some great strengths but also really frustrating weaknesses e.g. extremely poor/non-existent layout management, poor support for typography and no support for styling or branding. There were many positive aspects of course.

Microsoft gave you VB or C++, both with Win32 again. The C++ developer experience was horrid. VB was at least a scripting language with garbage collection, but, it was also constrained by the fact that B stood for "Beginners" so Microsoft were very reluctant to fix any of its legacy or add more powerful features.

Compared to that situation, scripting languages and especially Perl had some massive advantages:

1. Ran on UNIX/Big Iron which is where all the best hardware and databases could be found. Lots of devs liked UNIX because it was CLI and developer oriented.

2. Unashamedly designed for experts with tons of powerful features, quality of life stuff like integrated regex, garbage collection, proper stack traces, error logs you could view via telnet within seconds etc.

2. CPAN provided an ever growing repository of open source libraries, instantly accessible, for free! On Windows there were very few libraries, they were mostly quite expensive and closed source, no easy way to discover them (pre-Google) and only C++/Delphi devs could write them. VB was sort of a consumer-only language. Open source culture started with RMS at the MIT AI lab and so was very UNIX centric for a long time. Arguably it still is.

Really, it's hard to overstate how revolutionary proper garbage collection + CPAN was. GC is a force multiplier and CPAN is the granddaddy of all the open source library repositories we take for granted today. Imagine how unproductive you'd be without them.

The big downside was that Perl had no UI libraries and didn't really run on Windows. So how do you use it to write apps for normal people? Then Netscape started adding interactivity features to the web and it was all totally text based. Text was Perl's forte! Add the <form> tag, CGI, HTTP and now you're cooking with gas. Bye bye hateful 0xC00005 Access Violation errors and useless bug reports like "I clicked a button and the app disappeared".

The web was a huge step back for users, who went from having pretty sophisticated GUIs with fast table views, menus, shortcut keys, context menus, Office integration, working copy/paste, instant UI response etc to ... well, the web. But often users will suffer through that if it makes their devs more productive because all they really care about are features and competitive advantage. The web was crude but it let people escape the Windows ecosystem to one with open source + GC + pro languages + big iron UNIX.