Virgin? Prostitute? What?

Ultimately, the point is that Perl is one of the truly excellent high-level procedural languages, and while its object model feels tacked-on, it's quite capable. I'm thoroughly enamored with its closures. It excels at producing succinct, stable code very quickly, and while PHP is more accessible to the web development dilettante, and more ubiquitous on bargain-basement webhosts and in low-end general purpose web application software, there are areas where PHP simply does not measure up. Other languages that can fill the same needs Perl does that PHP does not include Ruby, Python, and some Lisp dialects, but the parsers for these languages don't tend to be as fast as Perl's, they don't tend to process text as easily as Perl, and there simply isn't the same supporting codebase out there.

I could continue. There are quite a few desirable characteristics that other languages cannot deliver (as well). Each language has its purpose, or it wouldn't have been created in the first place, and Perl is not a language that has been obsolesced or superseded (yet) by another extant language.