What difference could that make? There are lots of languages shipped in various distributions that are no longer 'living' languages in the sense that they have little mindshare and little new development is done in them. Perl wasn't one of those languages and now it is. If you want to comment on that or perhaps dispute it, sure. But the 'delete perl and see what happens' thing is beside-the-point nitpickery.
Perl has "little mindshare" and "little new development" in the same way as Bash. It's there, people who understand unix will reach for it when it's appropriate and it's as indispensable.
I want to know which distro removed perl because that's quite a drastic step and am interested in studying it. Sorry if that offends you.
It doesn't offend me, it just isn't related to the point I was making. You replied to me as if that sort of test is relevant and I don't think it is. The analogy to bash is similarly not suitable for this kind of argument - bash has never had any ambition to be a general purpose programming language, perl very much did. Unfortunately for perl, perl's own efforts in that regard pretty much eliminated the possibility of that ever happening. Python's trajectory hasn't been that, even with the travails of the 2/3 transition.
'look at how perl did things!' is just a really strange approach in a discussion about the Python 2/3 thing. That operation was successful, the patient died.
