I definitely would say it is worth learning Perl for the following reasons, some of which have already been mentioned in other comments:
- Actively developped: The current Perl 5.10 includes nice additions inspired by Perl 6.
- (Generally) high quality modules on CPAN for nearly everything you can think of
- Very helpful and responsive community
- It's FUN to program Perl. I don't have the feeling I need to adapt too much to the language when programming. I get fast into "the flow" when programming Perl, I don't feel forced to bend my mind around APIs instead of spending the time working on the problem. Programs can be written in a concise way, 100 lines of code are certainly better than 400 in another language, and it helps a lot when you can see a substantial part of a program (or even the whole ...) on a single screen. You can even accomplish a lot with a one liner on the command line.
- I also disliked the 1000 different and none completely convincing ways to do object oriented programming in Perl, but the Moose
way really feels like the right one, you should really try Moose out if you are going to evaluate Perl for your needs.
- You are not tied to one programming paradigm, let it be "everything is an object" or "... a string", Perl can adapt easily to different ones.
There is no hype around Perl (did I hear "Ruby on Rails..."?). Maybe there should be an extra effort to market Perl. As you can see e.g. on Perlmonks, people are really focused on problem solving, so you may get the IMHO wrong impression, nothing cool and new is happening. My advice: give Perl a try, you should get some impression in no time and in any case, it helps to learn about a new language and I know of no one who gut hurt using Perl (there certainly are languages that could easily hurt you, I know some examples personally, but I will stop here...)