Well, some of the things I've seen Perl used for here at work are (in alphabetical order):

• Automated data fetching
• Data munging
• Filtering
• Flow management and scheduling
• Format translation
• Prototyping
• Viewer backends
• Viewers (ASCII, CGI, Perl/Tk based)

All of which is Real Work.

We also have programs running in C and in C++, of course.