Personally, I've found knowing perl useful in some of the same ways that I've found C useful. Perl is still one of the most popular systems scripting languages

Personally, I've found knowing perl useful in some of the same ways that I've found C useful. Perl is still one of the most popular systems scripting languages and perl code always seems to show up somewhere important. If I were into serious application development I would probably try a project with Clojure before perl, but there are a lot of situations where that might not be desireable (eg you don't want to use the JVM).