I just had a look into Debians Popularity Contest (popcon.debian.org) and it seems that Perl is one of the most popular packages:
#rank name inst vote old recent no-files (maintainer)
1 base-files 5672 5358 81 233 0 (Santiago Vila)
2 debianutils 5672 5283 48 341 0 (Clint Adams)
3 dpkg 5672 5345 45 282 0 (Dpkg Development)
4 findutils 5672 5310 240 122 0 (Andreas Metzler)
5 grep 5672 5370 219 83 0 (Ryan M. Golbeck)
6 gzip 5672 5349 138 184 1 (Bdale Garbee)
7 perl-base 5672 5323 44 305 0 (Brendan O'dea)
8 tar 5672 4908 595 169 0 (Bdale Garbee)
9 util-linux 5672 4667 447 558 0 (Lamont Jones)
The number 5672 means installations and these are all top 9 packages with the highest installation number. Before people install anything else, they have a Perl !
(The first Kernel Image on that list is at rank 1996)
