Maybe not so much C, but I saw Perl 4/5 as very attractive for sysadmin-type engineers, because it was pretty much explicitly designed to make onboarding as eas

Maybe not so much C, but I saw Perl 4/5 as very attractive for sysadmin-type engineers, because it was pretty much explicitly designed to make onboarding as easy as possible for awk, sh, sed (and BASIC) programmers. Quite a few people I know got started with Perl because they were reasonably comfortable with awk, sh, or sed, started to outgrow their sweet spot, and found that perl provided a very natural transition from each of these languages, could do everything those scripts could do in fairly similar ways, and was obviously more powerful.