Perl has the advantage of only having one implementation, unlike sed and grep (e.g. BSD or GNU) and /bin/sh (can be one of many POSIX shells), so upgrading this

Perl has the advantage of only having one implementation, unlike sed and grep (e.g. BSD or GNU) and /bin/sh (can be one of many POSIX shells), so upgrading this pipeline to 100% perl is safer in some respects. The example in the article is light on details so it's hard to comment very deeply. I have heard snarky Perl putdowns ad nauseam at work and on HN and may have regretted using it a handful of times but I can say worse or similar for other popular tools, languages...