I am programming Perl for a long time. I would say, to me, it is more or less a kind of identity.
It is free software. It has a great community. Perl can be used, for batch processing, web development (as you mentioned), data analysis and text manipulation. It is multi-platform. It can interact withe C, C++. Java, Python, etc.
Last but not least it has the CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network), a huge repository of free code. If you missing a functionality, surely you will find some options there.
Perl is healthy and growing and you can easily be part of its community.