>>403
To get the only thing >>405 didn't cover, Perl's far from useless, a ton of stuff was and still is written in it. But in the past fifteen years or so it's lost a lot of popularity to other languages like PHP, Python, and Ruby. This is partially just a matter of fashion, partially some legitimate grievances with Perl (the big one being that Perl is perceived as extremely syntax heavy--that is, where Perl has a special form/operator to do something, many other languages would have a function in the standard library).
After you've learned one programming languages, others are generally pretty easy. Happy hacking!

>>406
Perl is neat for what it was intended for--powerful, batch scripting. This includes serving up Web pages, which works great because Perl clearly pays a lot of attention to playing with text (regular expressions, lists, and so on).

It is a little ugly to look at sometimes, but it's a shame how it's dying out as newer, hipper languages crop up.