The real strength of Perl (IMHO) is the CPAN library.   I saw this quite recently when briefly engaged at A Particularly Popular Legendary Eenterprise (that ought to have known better) when it rather rudely and inconveniently discovered that the Ruby Gems were nowhere as complete, and nowhere as debugged, as they had assumed based on their prior experiences with Perl.   (“Not Implemented Yet” is not what you ever want to see in your debugging output.)   It definitely caught some folks off-guard, and it surprised me too.

(I am not intending to put forth a “language vs. language” tirade here; nothing of the sort.   But we depend, utterly and completely, on the quality of our tools ... and the contributed libraries are a fundamental part of that.)

The Perl (5.x) language is functional, well-implemented, has a thoughtfully selected set of features, and bottom-line “it moves the freight.”   It has the features that you really need it to have, and, thanks to CPAN, they are generally rugged and dependable ... having passed hundreds if not thousands of self-tests, on your system, while being installed there.