Bioinformatics involves a lot of scripting and loosely coupled pipelines, and at the time of the HGP, there was no experience on how to do this. Here's the story of how Perl become so popular in bioinformatics, and arguably, "How it saved The Human Genome Project"!
https://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol1_2/tpj0102-0001.html
This is still true, but things are getting better. I'm a few years removed now, but I had the priviledge of getting to admin most major sequencing machines and their data output, and it was a great learning experience for how much the scientific community stands to gain from modern tech stacks imho.
One of my favorite examples, I was doing some fastq munging, and had written about a page of perl as per some existing documentation. I kept failing, and eventually just emailed the researcher who wrote the relevant paper... and he said something like "why not use awk, something like $oneliner?" With a few modifications my huge glut of perl became a one line awk...
Of course that just means I'm bad at perl, but for some reason it sticks in the mind. I still get invited to bioinformatics conferences... too bad I didn't take them up on it pre-pandemic.