[thesuperbigfrog]

It's actually a bit more than that.

In "Windows Powershell in Action", Bruce Payette (one of the co-designers of Powershell) states:

"NOTE PowerShell uses the at symbol (@) in a few places, has $_ as a default variable, and uses & as the function call operator. These elements lead people to say that PowerShell looks like Perl."

"In practice, at one point, we did use Perl as a root language, and these elements stem from that period. Later on, the syntax was changed to align more with C#, but we kept these elements because they worked well. In Perl terminology, they contributed significantly to the 'whipupitude quotient' of the language."

[anthk]

Perl had an amazing Win32 support back in the day, and still does.

https://perldoc.perl.org/Win32

https://metacpan.org/search?size=20&q=win32

RAS, OLE, COM, ODBC. Perl did magick on NT/2K/XP.

[HeckFeck]

And it was (may still be) used in the Windows build environment!

[singingfish]

VMS too!

[bmn__]

> whipupitude quotient

That's an axis, not a quotient. See page 2/slide 3&4: <https://www.shlomifish.org/lecture/Perl/Newbies/vhll-slides....>