Actually Apple announced a deprecation in 2019, so in some ways it’s surprising to still find Perl installed by default in macOS. From the Catalina release note

Actually Apple announced a deprecation in 2019, so in some ways it’s surprising to still find Perl installed by default in macOS. From the Catalina release notes[0]: Scripting Language Runtimes Deprecations Scripting language runtimes such as Python, Ruby, and Perl are included in macOS for compatibility with legacy software. Future versions of macOS won’t include scripting language runtimes by default, and might require you to install additional packages. If your software depends on scripting languages, it’s recommended that you bundle the runtime within the app. [0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-notes/macos-catalina-10_15-release-notes https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...