Aside from the fact that there is, undeniably, only perl for scripting on Windoze machines (if that isn't a contradiction in terms), one thing that, for *NIX machines, hasn't, AFAICT, yet been mentioned is that perl is installed other than on the root partition - thus any system scripts requiring the availability of perl (and the necessary parts of its' myriad of wonderful library modules) cannot start until the appropriate partition(s) has/have been checked and mounted ... but to get to that point perl must be available... mmmm, bit of a circular dependency thingy goin' on here methinx.

IMO, this is a classic case of horses for courses - shell script is marvellous (C shell excepted of course - Tom Christianson. http://www.perl.com/pub/language/versus/csh.html) for *NIX systems programming - for all else, perl is, by far & away, the front runner.

Just my 10 p'worth...