Perl is IMO still very powerful in the areas it has always been powerful in: text processing (regexes etc.), system administration, web development, and so on. Glancing over at *NIX help forums today shows that people are still getting a lot done with sed, awk, and perl one-liners. It's also come into use in the bioinformatics world, AFAIK for its power in handling text files. But Perl has also grown a significant amount:

what are hot items on CPAN these days?

Just to name a few "modern" ones:

• Moose and its lighter-weight friends like Moo (Update: also Type::Tiny)
• DBIx::Class
• Mojolicious and other web frameworks like Catalyst and Dancer2 (see also: UP-TO-DATE Comparison of CGI Alternatives, Re: CGI Parameters; Update: also PSGI and Plack are worth mentioning)

Although not exactly new, there are some other nice frameworks/libraries that IMO make Perl more "modern":

• Update: Strawberry Perl, perlbrew, plenv, and berrybrew
• Update: App::cpanminus (cpanm)
• Update: RJBS's set of Email::* modules, such as Email::Stuffer
• PDL for scientific numeric calculations (Update: I'm also a fan of Math::Prime::Util and ::GMP)
• event loop frameworks like POE and Mojo::IOLoop
• date/time manipulation via DateTime (Update: or, for simpler stuff, Time::Piece is in the core)
• file(name) manipulation via e.g. Path::Class or Path::Tiny, as well as modules like File::Find::Rule
• XML handling via e.g. XML::LibXML or XML::Twig, and many more
• many GUI frameworks
• Update: Try::Tiny (gives Perl a try "keyword" and hides some of the issues with eval)
• Devel::Cover for code coverage and Devel::NYTProf for profiling
• Update: Definitely not new, but I like the core modules that provide an OO interface such as File::stat, User::pwent, and Time::localtime (although Time::Piece is probably better than the latter nowadays)

Probably other monks can point out some of the "big ones" I've missed - see also Task::Kensho for even more modules. In general, I think even many of the modules that have been around for a really long time have matured to the point where they are more robust, have good test suites, etc. (e.g. Template, just to name one of many) - either that, or, in some cases, are now generally recommended against or deprecated.

Various minor edits, and updates as indicated.

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