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.