It clearly states in the Oreilly's books that, what it takes 1 person 3min to accomplish in perl the same task would take 12-13 accomplished programmers in C(ect) a year to accomplish the same goal.
My personal opinion on PERL is that, PERL is JELLO compared to water
The ability to pump out simple scripts in a IT,risk mgmt,network Engineer/Admin/SyS admim ect...feilds, that ability will bring you big dollars & respect.

I'm not talking about C&P code scrip7kiddi3 style either, I'm talking about when your boss appproches and says, I need BLAHBLAH BLAH BLAH and you have it whipped up in 3-7 minutes, He's happy your happy he takes a left you take a right ect.....
Scipting seperates the l00zer admins from the UBER admins. (anyone disagree?)
Personal opinion......man this forum sure is slow.
I guess people give up on PERL or something.

I think that Perl still has its uses in many places in the Unix world. Many things can be more easily done with perl and shell scripting when you don't need the overhead that accompanies newer OOP languages.

It is sorta like assembly language ... knowing it brings a bit of respect and it will always have a place with the lower-level type stuff that needs a quick 'n' dirty way to get stuff accomplished without overhead.

However truth be told, it is fine for most applcations to be sloppy and security and stabilty need only be "good enough".............wait that just gave me a thought about AdA95

One reason I love using perl is that I constantly learn how to abbreviate code more efficiently.

Perl is an excellent language for doing shell work, log parsing, website backends, the list goes on. I wrote a site backend once that updated image galleries, video galleries, news headlines, archives, etc, all using Perl on the backend. Perl fits in so well with databases, apache, Windows, Unix. Perl is an awesome language to know. You may not use it everyday, but wow can it come in handy.