Of course a competent Perl developer could have, after all that is his domain, but he'd still needs to come up with scalable hosting somewhere and why exactly would he want to do that in the first place?. As someone who's primary field isn't web development its amazing what one can put together in a weekend these days - if I had, say, a J2ME app a decade ago and wanted to do the same thing, I don't think I'd even try.