I'm not so sure about that. Maybe not a lot of project work, but there's Perl in odd places on the Internet. They probably don't want to hire contractors just to figure out what's going on. Also, they may also be using Perl for portable scripts they need to distribute to a number of different environments. Really, none of those other languages are BETTER than Perl for that and Perl is highly likely to be already installed in a lot of Linux and Unix systems.