Incidentally, so does Ruby.

Only because Perl takes heavy inspiration and syntax from Unix shells.

It's actually a bit more than that.

In "Windows Powershell in Action", Bruce Payette (one of the co-designers of Powershell) states:

"NOTE PowerShell uses the at symbol (@) in a few places, has $_ as a default variable, and uses & as the function call operator. These elements lead people to say that PowerShell looks like Perl."

"In practice, at one point, we did use Perl as a root language, and these elements stem from that period. Later on, the syntax was changed to align more with C#, but we kept these elements because they worked well. In Perl terminology, they contributed significantly to the 'whipupitude quotient' of the language."

Perl had an amazing Win32 support back in the day, and still does.

https://perldoc.perl.org/Win32

https://metacpan.org/search?size=20&q=win32

RAS, OLE, COM, ODBC. Perl did magick on NT/2K/XP.

And it was (may still be) used in the Windows build environment!

VMS too!

> whipupitude quotient

That's an axis, not a quotient. See page 2/slide 3&4: <https://www.shlomifish.org/lecture/Perl/Newbies/vhll-slides....>