I chose Perl deliberatly, around 1992 I think. After doing a few "simple" things in C++ and knowing it was not the best language for the job (but the language I knew very well), I went on a months-long search for another language to compliment C++. I remember some of what I looked at included Icon and (hmm, that's the only name I still remember).

Perl was a winner. It did more and was under active development, and met the requirements. I was especially pleased that although it was suitable for very small things (no includes to set up or other structure just to write hello world), it still had some support for programming in the large, namely package. That was before .pm files came along; before the huge boost Perl got with the coming of the world wide web.