Perl is still used in bioinformatics daily. People can write for days about why to use x instead of Perl, but at the end of the day, people can use modern perl

Perl is still used in bioinformatics daily. People can write for days about why to use x instead of Perl, but at the end of the day, people can use modern perl 5 to do anything anyone can do in any other technical community. The only serious downside to Perl (which is a pretty serious one I'll admit) is that it might be harder to lure in good programmers. I have met plenty of Perl programmers who advocate Perl because they are afraid to learn anything else. Still, I know a lot of Perl programmers who are so good they are not insecure and simply enjoy using it. At this point, I only use Perl for ad-hoc data munging-- things that I could just as easily use python for.