Having Perl available as 1) a powerful choice, 2) a well supported choice, 3) a friendly choice on as many platforms as possible is in the interest of everyone who wants Perl continuing to be used; which contributes to Perl continuing to be supported and improved; and the CPAN continuing to fill with an index of prefab solutions that other languages can't touch. As well you know Windows is a huge portion of the computer world.
I've owned nothing but Macs (and oh, okay! Tandys) for 25 years. If Perl didn't work on Mac, I'd have moved to Ruby and PHP. And I'd be badmouthing Perl for being a language that didn't care. I've boostered for Perl constantly in many ways and places for more than a decade. Losing even one user like me takes away at least a couple hundred other adopters. I'm sure we've lost plenty because Perl turned off similar WIndows users.
I'm not in the "Perl is Dying" Venn but it's obvious that Perl lost a lot of ground in the last decade and at least some of that is because it was only (easily) accessible to sysadmin *nix types.
And in the "But What About COBOL" camp, I realize plenty of Perl hackers like you, maybe even me at this point, are going to have high paying Perl jobs if they want them for the next 20 years at least even if Perl "dies."
The more life-blood we can take in, the more accessible Perl is to anyone with a programming problem, the more interesting, widespread, widely financially rewarding, and vibrant Perl will remain.
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