I remeber when I first installed Linux at home several years ago and during installation was presented with an option to install Perl, I even not thought a second. Of course, NOT! My vision of Perl than (based on occasional reading here and there, I did not knew it completely and not wished to know) was that it just not fit with the rest of Unix realm. You see, it simply contradicts the Unix philosophy that there are small cute tools one of each do just one small job, but do it perfectly, and the real power achived by endless combinations of these tools.

It is particularly strange and amazing how a thing which is so contradictory to the Unix philosophy from one side, just ideally comply with Unix from another. I mean this general spirit of - what? - hackery maybe; joy of using tools; elegance.

What is Perl actually? It is a replacement of shell scripts and of miriad unix utilities (well, well, it is more than that of course). But inside Perl all these things which applicable to creative use of shell programming - interoperability, extendibility, and the ubiquitous "more than one way..." - are still applicable, moreover, these things even more colorful and exciting. So we have like a "second Unix environment" here.

So may be the right way in which Unix should develop is a sort of "Perl shell" were all Perl constructs are built-ins and all Perl libraries are external commands?