Another thing to consider: why is perl in the base system. Assume you need a script language, because writing everything in C is cumbersome.
What are the choices ? - you need something under and acceptable licence, so python is out. (Artistic Licence is "close enough"); - you need something that builds everywhere, so python is out (hard to build without dynamic libraries, that was vax...); - you want a modicum of security, so shell and tcl and php are out. - awk would kind of work, except it's not that readable, and it wouldn't scale up to some of the things we use perl for. Perl constituted a great compromise back in the day I chose it to replace pkg_add. It still IS a great compromise, and it's not THAT large compared to other pieces. Over the years, things have moved back&forth from language to language. makewhatis used to be C+shell, then it became perl, and now it's pure C because it's integrated in mandoc... I shudder to think how much time was spent in there. Note that Ingo also moved /etc/security from shell to perl, so he's not adverse to perl. As far as I'm concerned, having perl in the base system is a strength of OpenBSD... it does minimize the number of script languages used for ports infrastructure as compared to other languages. perl also has impressive support tools, be they in the base system or in ports. NYTProf is still the best profiler I've ever seen on any language.
