alt Hacker News> Nowadays it is increasingly niche.
Still, if you buy a brand new mac today, most of the executable scripts in the system are written in perl.
You can check it yourself by running:
file -bL /bin/* /usr/bin/* | cut -d' ' -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
The bad thing with using a proper language like Perl for admin scripts is that they will degenerate into programs.
The good thing with Bash etc is that they are so bad you wont and when you do it anyway atleast you get some whip lashes for it.