>>14
Lisp had an entire commercial OS written in, and that OS had features that are still not replicated in current OSes. You have no idea what a language is capable of, since you just don't know it.
However, most of what you incorrectly call 'systems programming'(I don't remember seeing drivers written in Python or Perl, I have seen multiple cases of OSes written entirely in Lisp(with appropriate compilers). Most true systems programming these days is done in C (both for *nix and C).). Writing shell scripts or similar simple CLI applications in Perl and Python is barely systems programming. Lisp can easily do that, but it's not that often used for it, but I do agree that using Perl for just filtering some data on the command line and other simple administrative tasks is fine, as that's what the language was designed for, which means using the right tool for the job, but it's a bit sad if they were to use it for designing complex systems and just created a buggy mess.