It just shows how relative all these lists are.

Yeah, I sort of scratch my head trying to figure where they come up with some of these lists sometimes, but I figure any time Perl is mentioned as being "important" or "in demand" has GOT to be a good thing. Also, seemed like a bright spot on a Monday morning, Perl getting a mention in the news, even if the accuracy was a little off.

It may have taken some inspiration ...

I think it's more than just "some inspiration". For one, there's direct support (in the form of language built-ins) for a multitude of Unix system calls/commands, such as fork, exec, wait, select, kill, lstat, symlink, chmod, chown, getpwnam, etc. - only to name a few.

The docs even clearly state Perl's Unix heritage:

"Perl was born in Unix and can therefore access all common Unix system calls. (...)"

Yes, "Perl was born in Unix" and has now long grown out of that crib.

It are such "absolute truths" which damage our beloved Perl's image, as they do not take into account the very dynamism that lies at its heart.

Other such "truths" which spring to mind are "Perl is CGI", "Perl code is unreadable", "Perl development has stalled", "Perl is dead", ...

At each and every opportunity we must stand united and fight them.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James