Because of how powerful is Perl? Because of the amount of things that depend on Perl that currently exist and would be a waste of time to rewrite? Because Perl might be the best tool for many cases? There are many possible answers...
Not that coding in Lua, scsh or similar tools is bad. Not that the regular shells are not up to the task in many cases. Simply that... Perl seems to be such a powerful language that people would end up installing it anyway - And if you have an optional package installed in 95% of the machines, then you have something I would like calling 'base'.
Excuse me, but I'm not arguing Lua vs. Perl, or tiny languages vs. Perl. Rather I'm challenging Colin Watson's statement, "Take away Perl and you've got only shell, C, and C++ left".
-- http:// if le.o /
