I wouldn't knowingly start large projects in it, but I use it all the time for projects that can be done in a few days, or at most weeks.

I learned it when I became a manager and no longer had time for real programming but still needed to automate stuff. I stepped down to become a real programmer again but I'm ever grateful for learning Perl. It's incredibly productive.

If you have a Linux system, try this:

    find / -name 'perl*' -prune -o -name '*.pl' -print 2>/dev/null

You will probably find a bunch of random scripts in various places. A lot of random system admin stuff got written in Perl, and those stick around for a long time. There is also a ton of miscellaneous software tooling that got written in Perl, like scripts to generate some C code that you compile.

Perl sometimes still gets used because it’s available on systems that don’t have Python.

Unless it's changed recently, the control center apps in Mandrake descendants is in Perl.

I'm pretty sure they use it heavily at DuckDuckGo. Possibly also Cloudflare?

I use it a lot for ETL.

In comparison with Logstash, for example, it is much more flexible and the scripts are simpler and shorter.

I believe Booking.com uses a lot of Perl.

Craigslist