Perl is no longer my first choice for scripting. Once upon a time perl was preinstalled on almost every Linux box and was a default package on most distributions, now you can't assume that. Also it is a bit difficult to use cpan - often the c code for a module does not compile for some reason during installation and you have to go and figure; on the other hand I never had any problems with pip. (Though I still don't quite like Python)

On the other hand bash has maps so it is possible to use that more for scripting.