Perl is still heavily used. I wrote more than 2K lines just last week, lots of it is throwaway. But hey not many languages make it easy for you to write thousands of lines of throwaway code in hours.

It's still the most useful language in the backend/unix world. This comes from me, who actually writes lots of Python code. But I wouldn't use Python where I use Perl. It would just make me slow and it wouldn't get the job done just as well as Perl.

It's not used as frequently for web dev, or other places where Java is used. But it's very good at what it does. Glue language for the Unix world.