Wasn't Perl created for the NSA? At least that's a story I heard. The official JPL reason is a cover.

Or maybe it was created for both. Or neither. Shrug.

Just googled it.. Here's a quote from Larry:

    [...] the NSA project Perl was (indirectly) written to support.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3394

Another one from his 2005 State of the Onion:

> You might say that Perl grew out of the Cold War. I've often told the story about how Perl was invented at a secret lab that was working on a secret NSA project, so I won't repeat that here, since it's no secret

https://www.perl.com/pub/2005/09/22/onion.html

It was for the high-assurance BLACKER VPN:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacker_(security)

Here's the source on that:

http://cahighways.org/wordpress/?p=5460

Another notable aspect of that was it used an early secure kernel, GEMSOS, that is still marketed by Aesec but probably in legacy mode in bad way. It did resist penetration during NSA certification and time on market far as what data I have says.

http://aesec.com/

Great links, thanks.

Well mostly Python for scripting. But it might be 2.4 running on RHEL 5 or something silly like that.