I'd just like to pt out (re post #12) that, whilst bash (any shell really) is an interpreted lang ie every cmd has to be re-parsed each time it's used, even in a loop, Perl is actually compiled-on-the-fly at program startup http://www.perl.com/doc/FMTEYEWTK/comp-vs-interp.html.
Net upshot is it's MUCH faster than eg bash.
Also, as sundialsvcs says, it's got a huge library of pre-built modules.
The Perl guys also keep a lot of backward compatibility.

If I would make a distro, I'd go for Bash + Perl + C/C++ (C/C++ over Perl, Perl over Bash)
And sometimes I might choose Ruby instead of Perl. Depends..

The amount of time required to "compile source code" before execution (which might not even apply in some cases, e.g. Python's ".pyc" files) is truly inconsequential. It pure-and-simply does not matter at all.

Perl .. Python .. Ruby .. there are lots of choices, and lots of libraries. (Although I recently worked with a project, at a very, very household-name company, that found out the hard way that Ruby's packages in some cases were not nearly as battle-tested as Perl's. So it goes ... "your mileage may vary(TM).")

The bottom line is, these are all readily-available, very mature, programming systems that are at your fingertips. Thanks to the magic of the "#!" ("shebang") line, you can use any or all of them to construct your commands and other programs, and no one will ever know. Thanks to their extensive and well tested libraries, you can construct your new solutions very quickly indeed ... leveraging, instead of replicating, what has already been done.