The keen on hacking has changed to people who have a real passion for it. Technology, including code, has evolved and is not for people not dedicated to hacking. There really is no more "emulating" CLI logins and such because they patched, we hacked, patched, hacked, etc... Evolution is inevitable. And Pearl is still widely used. I know a lot of Metasploits exploits are written in Pearl, and if I'm not mistaken, Metasploit originated using pearl. Python and other scripting layers came later.