For this particular case, I'm not sure what drove the selection, but I would guess (since the decision would have been made many decades ago!) it was probably based around perl trying to operate similarly to other command line tools of that era, like awk, sed, (or even ed?), so that people could switch to perl and have a familiar environment? But I don't know, nor have I researched it. In any case, perhaps give the designers the benefit of the doubt before assuming their incompetence?
