I think the key word is "was". Yes, in the beginning it was a pretty straightforward amalgamation of a bunch of standard Unix tools. (Although it should be note

I think the key word is "was". Yes, in the beginning it was a pretty straightforward amalgamation of a bunch of standard Unix tools. (Although it should be noted that those were even then in a separate category from languages meant for application programming!) But that's where the Perl timeline started to diverge from the mainstream, in which production-ready programming languages have mostly grown to agree on basic concepts and terminology, and to emphasize design principles like clarity over cleverness and readability over writability.