@ryo @charliebrownau @furgar Well, I used Gentoo in the past, so to me that's a tolerable slowness. Anyway, doing a lot of things with C is a pain, and Perl was the scripting language for that kind of thing back in the day, and it was in pretty much every base system, so they used it, and now rewriting everything would be a pain. Hell, the default window manager is FVWM, and Perl is a dependency for that.

Programming languages are a problem in general. Even now, what would you use? Scripting languages exist for a reason, it's because you don't want to use C for everything because it's a pain. Newer scripting languages are as slow as Perl (except when compiled, like Lua with LuaJIT), and much much slower for working with strings, and have versions that are incompatible with each other.

Really, if you ask me, scripting languages shouldn't even exist, there should just be one language with a solid, simple and consistent design, that can do everything. The fact that scripting languages exist indicate deficiencies in both C and in shell. Lisp can do all that, but it is pretty dead in general, and most people don't like the syntax, and so far, every attempt to give it a more conventional syntax has failed, and changing it now means throwing away a whole lot of work that has been done over more than half a century. And most of those languages are dead. Tcl is almost dead, and doesn't have a compiler. Maybe Rhombus (Racket 2.0) will succeed, but who the fuck knows? Apparently Wolfram Language has a syntax that accomplishes the same, but that's proprietary, and very specialized.

Meanwhile, there are thousands of languages, all trying to be like C, and mostly fucking failing.