As far as I know, it is popular in bioinformatics because of https://bioperl.org/ Universities use that often in their curriculum.

Most Linux distributions contain ungodly amounts of Perl.

The only person I've worked with over the past 20+ years who used Perl was a bioinformatics guru. When he taught students in the lab, however, he'd switch to Python.

Bioinformaticisn here. While Perl has been popular in the field, R, Python, C/C++, and recently Rust are more common these days. I think it mostly has to do with the fact that bioinformatics used to be mainly dealing with huge text files (FASTA, FASTQ, SAM, BED, GTF/GFF, etc.), and for that purpose Perl is not a bad choice.

As the cost of sequencing keeps coming down, we sequence deeper, and the computational demand goes up. Plain-text is replaced with binary formats, and most of the heavy lifting is now done by compiled libraries. The benefits of Perl aren't really relevant anymore, and given the choice most of us simply prefer writing Python or R.

Perl was obsolete like 10 years ago.

15 is pushing it.

Perl 6 never caught on.

And I should have written "obsolete" in quotes, because it's basically very idiomatic sloppy python and no one is saying python is obsolete.

Démodé is a better description.

I thought it was more that python was basically perl with the fun bits removed.

Or to put it another way: python helps you think more like the computer does. Perl helps the computer think more like you do.

Perl was a beautiful name and sounded like "Pearl". Perl 6 is named "Raku" which I find substantially worse naming.

I think those of us drawn to Perl by its beautiful name (and potentially-art syntax...) have long since migrated to Ruby, for better or for worse.

It is still doing large amounts of plumbing all over the Internet....