Absolutely. It is comparable to python in some ways, but makes it much easier to write quick one-liners using regexes and data manipulation, and to scale those up to real programs. It fills the gap between bash scripts using awk, grep and sed, and C/java/C#. Compared to bash scripting, perl is a real programming language. The documentation and library ecosystem are excellent, backwards compatibility is legendary, yet it supports modern Unicode. The syntax is weird, but try it for a bit, read the man pages, it's not that hard. The OO system is weirder, and I wouldn't make complex class hierarchies in it, but it is usable.
I like how Awk is just a single executable. A single-executable Perl that includes only the core library would be great. There is Microperl [0, 1], but no idea how well it compiles with more up-to-date Perl versions.
