... whereas I disagree with that notion quite strongly.   Although many of us may be accustomed to spending most of our daily grind, grinding out web applications, the Perl language is used for anything and everything, every day.   The Core ought to be a collection of both mandatory-things and often-useful things ... but, in the latter case especially, always rather small things.   No kitchen-sinks allowed here.

This is one of the most significant impacts of PHP’s very un-modular architecture, and one that we want to avoid in this tool:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 32222704 Jul 31 2012 /usr/bin/php
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 86000 Jun 24 2009 /usr/bin/perl

“Admittedly by-design,” PHP is a great big phat language that is targeted for writing web-sites and therefore good for not much else ... although I certainly have seen it being used for scripting.   Perl’s “Core” should be lean, mean, and useful ... and emphatically not a substitute for having to separately install modules from CPAN (or elsewhere) as an additional step.   (We already have several “bundled packages”available to simplify common installs.)   PHP’s designers intentionally did what they did for the PHP tool, and I am here neither to praise nor to bury that engineering choice.   But to do the same, IMHO, would not be the right thing to do engineering choice for the Perl tool.

IMHO, the true strength of Perl is:   91007 Uploads, 27617 Distributions, 121586 Modules, 10676 Uploaders ... good for what ails you, no matter what it may be, and all in (to quote Disney’s Aladdin), “itty-bitty living space.”