It might sound strange to modern eyes but there was an time when Perl was considered elegant and robust, but then again very few young people have ever experienced the horrors of trying to write portable shell code for commercial Unix, perl was on the other hand almost completely identical regardless of what variant of Unix you happened to be running, and vastly faster then sh/awk at a time when even expensive systems could be slow by modern standards.

For modern day script writers Ruby and Python have all but replaced perl even though that's not stopping the enterprise from keeping their perl codebases alive and kicking for the foreseeable future, but even there it's being challenged from bellow by the fact that bash and gawk have become fairly universal on Linux systems and hardware fast enough that regex performance rarely matter.