We did the same thing with raw packet programming; the only realistic alternative at the time was pre-8.0 Tcl.
WebL is a little more advanced than Perl or Python with its nondeterministic concurrency and combinators. I think the concurrency is best implemented with an event loop, which I think both Perl and Python had in 1997 (maybe not Python). But this related paper, which funnily enough I re-read yesterday, says that they implemented it in Java with threads:
http://static.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceed...
(Actually this version doesn't seem to say it, but the version I have does.)
I would like to think that Python saved the world, but Perl and to some extent Java were already around. Java might have started been after Python, but it was popular before Python was.
This is the world Paul Graham was talking about in "Beating The Averages" --- actually, he was talking about a time ~4-5 years later, when the industry mainstream was C/C++ and Java.
You get my point, I'm sure. Today it would be pretty silly to invent whole new programming language just to get an I/O loop and some helper functions. In 1997, people did that.
A couple of years later I worked at a startup with a DSL which worked on similar lines (closer to Occam) but introduced the notion of a "race" (somewhat like the parallel combinator in Webl) so that a number of parallel tasks could be terminated by the one that finished first (possibly some kind of timeout). Occam doesn't have that notion at all. Nor does Esterel, or any other similar language that I know of...
By today's expectations, I assumed a "programming language for the web" meant a client-side language -- an alternative to Java with a HTTP focus, implemented as a Netscape plugin perhaps. Instead, WebL turned out to be a server-side language for implementing crawlers and data transformers. Quite interesting.
