I agree from the human genome sequencing perspective and the superlatives of saving the HGP. But at the time I was a standard software dev who thought the topic was cool, as was this new fan dangled language named perl.

However, I got into the genomics world in the early aughts, and the perl hung on and on and on. I remember starting a new job in the mid-teens, and one of the first tasks I had was to port over a legacy perl script. Such is the world of scientific software. 99% of the people I know who have touched perl since ~2003ish are in the bioinformatics space.