you seem to forget that Perl5 was developed to be compatible to Perl4, which was primarly meant to be used in the sh ecosystem.

To phrase it differently "Perl started as a bash on steroids." (Friedo at LPW)

And that's the fundamental problem in Perl's public awareness , outsiders see "cryptic" and "golfed" code stemming from the approach to have maximum success with minimal typing, giving Perl this "Write once" reputation.

But for bigger projects you need speaking functions, because "Code is more often read then written" (Guido v R)

But Perl can do both, for instance:

        my $line = <STDIN>;            # concise shell style
        my $line = readline(STDIN);    # readable for beginners
[download]

So Perl is in the position of an universalist which is losing ground against specialists.

Like a penguin which started as a bird, it can walk on ground, but fails in a speed and beauty contest with dolphins, which can neither walk nor fly.

At the same time there is a huge niche for CLI scripting and bash is really not a good solution for bigger apps, especially when people start pasting the shell code into an editor.

My idea is to help the penguin to fly again, to better compete in the Bash and PowerShell market, and to have a "lead in" effect from hackers coming from CLI to app programming.