Personally, back when Perl 6 was harmless vaporware, I never found a place for Perl 5.

For moderately advanced text processing with regular expressions, supposedly its strong point, it was far less elegant and concise than AWK at the low end and far less readable and less batteries-included than Python for more complex tasks involving some integration.

For dynamic web pages, another of the main uses of Perl, PHP was purposefully designed and (while not really good) practical and user-friendly, with plenty of other obviously more robust and serious options (Ruby, Java, later Python, etc.) for more enterprise projects.

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runjake 8 hours ago | parent [-]

It sounds like Perl just wasn't your style and that's okay.

But, Perl was immensely popular, particularly in the 1990s in its 4.x/5.x days. We used it because it was precisely more elegant, ergonomic and performant than awk :-)

Later on, Python gained more traction because it was more batteries-included, and PHP evolved from being a toy named "Personal Home Page".

	▲	HelloNurse 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Perl was immensely popular, but it isn't necessarily enough to qualify for the personal "bubble" of languages one learns. It was a good choice of proven, general purpose interpreted scripting language for you in a time when Perl competed with AWK and shell scripts, but in the 1990s I used mainly C and C++ before adopting Java quite early and almost exclusively; when I later decided to learn some proven, general purpose interpreted scripting language Python was my obvious choice: more advanced than Perl 5 and more popular than Ruby.