Yes. Perl will give you incredible power and you will have a lot of fun in the process.
First and foremost, it is great for writing scripts. It is much more civilized and faster than bash. If your script does anything more than calling a couple programs, writing it in Perl is a good idea. It has almost instant startup time, unless you use some heavy modules.
Secondly, its one-liners are very capable and can efficiently solve problems you would normally solve by a mixture of bash, sed and awk. Once you learn regexes it can mung text more efficiently than any other tool.
Lastly, if you wish so, it can scale up so that you can write full-blown applications in it. It is good for all kinds of backend tasks with the help of CPAN modules. As a bonus, any application you write should last you for a very long time, since both the interpreter developers and the community in general take preserving backward compatibility seriously.
Please note that a bit older technologies like Perl don't generate as much noise to get excited about. There is no new language feature, library or framework announced every month. Instead you can start investing early into your future by writing personal programs in it that will likely last you a lifetime and will not require constant tweaking as the ecosystem changes. Perl interpreter is not a "moving target", and many established CPAN libraries aren't either. It's a solid platform to develop stable, useful software.
Languages don't really exist in isolation, especially general purpose languages. They depend on community for things like libraries, support, compiler & tooling development, etc.
You can use a dead language if you want, but you're going to lose out on all of that. And you'd better not ever want anyone to help you with your projects...
The tool analogy is flawed. Languages that move fast and break backward compatibility are tools, but organic. If you leave them in your toolbox for too long they start to rot.
This does not apply to those languages that do not get updated (bash?) and that does not break backwards compatibility (perl? but without CPAN modules). I know that my PHP tool has rotted even though I was actively using it. It moves too fast and the frameworks I was using are no longer any popular - should've learned symfony instead of yii, now laravel is taking over
You can, but you don't have to. With some self discipline, Perl can be very readable. The only problem is that actually requires skill and agreement in development team. Perl Best Practices helps with that.
The strict guidelines followed by the one Perl shop I worked at briefly kept things very simple, but also very different from the "Modern Perl" revival that was being pushed back then, in the early 2010s.
The company I worked at maintained some ETL pipeline on behalf of Yahoo, and the strict guidelines from the client and the ones developed internally stayed you from using anything coming from CPAN.
That means that you didn't get to have function signatures, as those were a package back then, you had to declare all your arguments at the beginning of the subroutine body by taking them off the implicit parameter variables.
Programming in it wasn't crazy for sure, but it just felt like a really clunky Python. The split between the data structures that could be handled by reference and the ones that didn't was very unfortunate, Yahoo mandated that you only use the ref-type, and you had to be converting back and forth.
Well, that was part of my experience working for some 6 months at a team where strict discipline kept a big system working, but there was little upside to using Perl. The worst was the error handling in this scheme, keeping your own makeshift stack trace with backing up the error variables was a hassle.
First and foremost, it is great for writing scripts. It is much more civilized and faster than bash. If your script does anything more than calling a couple programs, writing it in Perl is a good idea. It has almost instant startup time, unless you use some heavy modules.
Secondly, its one-liners are very capable and can efficiently solve problems you would normally solve by a mixture of bash, sed and awk. Once you learn regexes it can mung text more efficiently than any other tool.
Lastly, if you wish so, it can scale up so that you can write full-blown applications in it. It is good for all kinds of backend tasks with the help of CPAN modules. As a bonus, any application you write should last you for a very long time, since both the interpreter developers and the community in general take preserving backward compatibility seriously.
Please note that a bit older technologies like Perl don't generate as much noise to get excited about. There is no new language feature, library or framework announced every month. Instead you can start investing early into your future by writing personal programs in it that will likely last you a lifetime and will not require constant tweaking as the ecosystem changes. Perl interpreter is not a "moving target", and many established CPAN libraries aren't either. It's a solid platform to develop stable, useful software.