Perl 5 went through a long nadir of unpopularity due in large part to its deserved “Write Once, Read Never” reputation. So I was surprised to find out not only is it installed by default on Debian, it’s installed nearly everywhere by default. It’s even the non-shell scripting language of choice on OpenBSD!
Perhaps the only thing more impressive than Perl’s utter ubiquity is its longevity. The latest major version of Perl was first released in 1994. It came into existence on this planet less than a year after I did. It’s even arguably more portable than the median shell script - different Unices might use Bash, Zsh, Ksh, or even something newfangled like Fish, but for the most part a Perl 5 program is a Perl 5 program is a Perl 5 program.
I submit that we glorified sysadmins should all consider Perl 5 in a new light in the age of machines which can both adequately explain, and pump out, decent Perl for any number of mundane use cases, given these other sideline advantages the language has. It’s just not that hard anymore to look at 3 lines of shell noise, ask ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude for a breakdown, and then - if we’re being really ambitious here - actually study what it says enough that we can start to use these same features ourselves in the future with some fluency. Write Once, Read Never was a much worse thing in an age where you might be the only person around who understands even 30% of Perl.