alt Hacker NewsBecause it works.
I introduced it into some of our release tooling in the mid-2000s. Easy to integrate, easy to understand, unsurprisingly good string/text handling, expect was very useful, and it’s not going to be used by anyone else, so no worries about version conflicts.
It ran successfully largely unchanged for around a decade.
Everything works. PHP works. Perl works. Bash works.
I like to use tools that more than merely work.
There's a reason nobody outside EDA uses it.