Perl definitely had its place in the world of scripting particularly sysadmin automation tasks as well as early days of CGI scripting. Since then do, other languages (with easier syntax - IMHO) have taken the lead.

I guess like everything in life, nothing is permanent and what is hot tech. today will be a legacy product Tomorrow.

Perl's story reminds of yet another language -- REXX. It's powerful as a scripting/text parsing language but due to it's Mainframe label, 99% of programmers Today haven't worked with it.