Comment You must not maintain servers (Score 1) 164
Perl is still a great replacement for shell scripts, sed and awk. It's native regex support is ahead of it's time. You can do crazy string manipulation and statistical gathering with no effort at all. A bunch of web log parsers were written in Perl and it's easy to see why, because the language was designed for that sort of purpose. Perl is to server administration and string parsing what PHP is to CGI.