I'm sorry I've come into this discussion late, but being a frequent poster and follower of the UserLinux mailing list, I needed to comment here. The original poster here is incorrect. If he had followed the discussions a bit further, he would have found that Perl is a required part of the Debian core, and, therefore, required for UserLinux.

Now, for a bit about UserLinux. UserLinux is not necessarily a distinct distribution. It will be based on Debian and use Debian packages. What it is about is choices. UserLinux is making choices about what packages are needed for a base corporate installation. When corporate network administrators see

[steve@gandalf /usr/bin]$ ls | wc -l
   2472
[download]

they get really nervous. This will be improved by UserLinux. However, if someone needs or wants a package not in the base install, they can simply do an apt-get and download it.

Now onto the Perl question. The choice to promote Python over Perl had been mentioned above. I have seen very little Gnome 2 programming done with Perl. Python, on the other hand, is used extensively as a GUI programming languange by several Linux distributions. On Fedora, for example, the supplied GUI configuration tools are all written in Python. Python is also quicker to learn, which is a selling point for the PHBs. Since the focus of the distribution is to provide a easy to use, GUI-based environment that is easy to migrate users to, Python makes more sense to promote as a language to achieve that goal.