[eigenlicht]

I've forgotten almost everything about Perl, but one thing I dimly remember is that for just about anything exceeding your one-liner/dirty one-off script (outgrow bash??) you'd use some library anyway, even for purposes like this. Just to make it sane. In other words it came down to more or less what you do in Python post Y2K: run(['blah'], ...) Not necessarily shorter (how?), probably not better (how?), certainly not safer (nope!) and "even" to reproduce everything subprocess can do these days I think you'd rather needed 3 or 4 imports, minimum, and remember this is Perl. So we're not talking standard library. Off to CPAN you were. Not all was great, even in heyday, and eventually people jumped ship for reasons, different reasons. Still, Perl deserved better than a bizarre zombie afterlife or undead pseudo-existence hinging on hardly more than worn out UNIX yarn. Funny how no one ever recalls tcl? Such is true rest. Such is nirvana. Yet tcl got that actual object system that never arrived for Perl. Tcl could do threads when Perl hardly knew there's such a thing! Oh and yes, tcl shipped its own GUI on top, consider that, vanilla Python even comes with it today I think. That's a way to go.

[WesolyKubeczek]

It’s interesting that while macOS is weeding out scripting language runtimes as the internal tools get rewritten (in Swift, I presume), one that is likely to prevail is Perl, so deeply is it entrenched there.

Curiously enough, Ventura ships with not one but two perls, 5.18 and 5.30. I haven’t yet investigated which tools there are using Perl. (It could also be that some prominent third party applications still call out to Perl, expect it to be there, and vendors asked nicely. How else would you explain the 5.18?)

It seems to be an apt illustration of the Lindy effect more than anything.