Perl has been aptly called “the Swiss Army Knife®, or the duct tape, of the web.”  http://perl.about.com/od/gettingstartedwithperl/p/whatisperl.htm

But it is used for a lot more than just “the web,” because it turns out to be so gosh-darned useful for so many things.   Many languages (such as PHP) are fairly special-purpose in their “typical” deployments, and of course are carefully designed to excel at doing those things in those environments.   (Which they unquestionably do, to the satisfaction of many people including myself.)   Perl, on the other hand, is truly “general-purpose.”   It is actually quite difficult to generalize about all the many things that Perl is called-upon to do.   That’s because it is the well-worn, well-honed tool that is carefully put away in so many professionals’ daily tool boxes, and picked up daily.   (Almost...) No matter what the job is, this tool will do it.

While I am writing this, four different computers are churning away at the task of parsing about 11,000 SAS,® SQL and Shell-script files to populate an SQLite database with about 89 megabytes’ worth of information.   All in Perl.   (They will be finished in about eleven minutes.)   This task obviously has nothing at all to do with “the web,” but Perl is doing the job with grace and style ... and raw power.

Take this advice from an old fart who’s been programming professionally for thirty years:   Get to know Perl.   Get to know it very, very well.   The time you spend doing so, will be time well spent.

“Languages” will always be in-demand.   There is no “One Language To Rule Them All,” nor will there ever be.   The more of them you know, the better.   (My personal count is “somewhere north of twenty.”)   No language will ever displace any other, because millions of lines of critical source-code have been written in each.   It takes time to learn, or even to learn about, a programming language, of course.   Just make it your business to put Perl in your toolkit, and do it soon.