On the other hand, bundled Perl versions have been a bane as much as a boon for the language. After a lull because everyone was holding their breath for Perl6, there's been a decent amount of development regarding the Perl interpreter, and if your target server still bundles 5.0008...
And upgrading that might risk incompatible system services, which is why sysadmins usually have way fewer problems adding something like Perl or Python. Isolated language environments (cf. perlbrew) are a nice solution to this, at least until you happen upon a particular paranoid admin.
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Perl is bundled with many linux distributions and is a hard dependency for many popular programs. It isn't going away.
On the other hand, bundled Perl versions have been a bane as much as a boon for the language. After a lull because everyone was holding their breath for Perl6, there's been a decent amount of development regarding the Perl interpreter, and if your target server still bundles 5.0008...
And upgrading that might risk incompatible system services, which is why sysadmins usually have way fewer problems adding something like Perl or Python. Isolated language environments (cf. perlbrew) are a nice solution to this, at least until you happen upon a particular paranoid admin.
Neither is m4!