The ability to deliver atomic, easily-installed apps would increase the popularity of Perl among the people who write the apps, not the people who use them. If a developer with the freedom to do so is picking an implementation language for an app, and one language requires delivering a bundle of modules and maybe getting the installer to do some other hand-waving, and the other language has an easy, ready-made way to shrinkwrap and deliver the app, that fact could very well sway her away from Perl if the other (dis-)advantages of the respective languages balance each other out.
Exactly. One case at work involved a complex installation that had a master installer that would run other parts. It would have been great to write that in Perl. But, how does one run a Perl program off a CD without "installing" it or the whole Perl system first? Even using a bundling system like PerlApp had a certain amount of risk involved. Instead, we wrote that piece in InstallShield, which easily makes a self-contained single runable file that can be simply run from the CD or other location, and is known to do that well. However, it turned into a terrible mess because the language isn't at all robust or suitable for larger programs. I wanted to use Perl because of Perl the language. I could not deliver a Perl solution because of Perl the system.
—John
