Is X11/KDE considered part of the "base system"? If yes, then:
> indeed, there's quite a few commenters here who I think would be surprised to learn that not only is C++ on this list, but that it's been on it for at least 25 years
The Debian base system is much, much smaller. I'm surprised that people consider Python to be part of it. However, APT depends on Perl and the C++ run-time library, so those two languages have been part of the base system for a very long time.
You can of course add your own "apt" binary in /usr/local/bin/apt which can be written in any language you like, say COBOL, Java, Common Lisp or Python.
Sorry, I meant that something in the package management stack depends on Perl (not APT specifically).
It looks like in trixie, it's libpam-modules that pulls in debconf, which is written in Perl. And libpam-modules is required by util-linux, which is Essential: yes.
