Your post got me thinking about what Perl is good for.

I can't talk about the full-time programming crowd, but I've no doubts that Perl is a great tool for anybody multi-disciplinary. Heck, my job title has "marketing" in it, and I'm using Perl all the time. I've got voluminous logs of e-commerce activity every day, I've got database systems here and with our distributors that don't speak each other's language, and we outsource our IT so I've got some "make these systems work" sorts of problems that come my way. Given all that, Perl helps me save a boatload of time and do my job better.

I've a lot of friends in intro-level IT sorts of positions, too, and they've been really receptive to Perl. With not too much time invested learning Perl, they can now attack systematically problems they were brute-forcing or doing by hand before. Why cycle error logs or mailbox archives manually when you can invest a few minutes making Perl do it for you?

From my perspective, Perl is still the best at what Perl does.