(I'm assuming you mean the latest Perl actually called Perl, and not its successors.)
In a vacuum I wouldn't recommend Perl over first learning the most common languages and technologies of today. I'd gain some familiarity with Python first at a minimum. But it does have some interesting niche advantages you might want to look into more down the road.
Perl 5 has been on the same major version for 30 years now [1], and hence has had a truly enormous amount of training data for LLMs to glomp onto. Since Perl is also primarily thought of as a "scripting-plus" language, something to reach for when Bash isn't cutting the mustard but a 'real program' feels too heavyweight, a lot of its use cases are very much in the LLM one-shot sweet spot. [1]
Perl 5 also has the unique advantage of being installed system-wide by default on more Unix machines than you might expect. It's sitting there quietly on Debian for you right now [2]. It's even the scripting-plus language of choice for OpenBSD!
You would think being "the same" for 30 years would also mean Perl almost accidentally performs really well on modern machines, which have a few orders of magnitude more resources to throw around. I haven't really found this to be that noticeable, though, and if I actually cared about performance in those domains I'd probably stick to the smallest tools I could work with first. Then again, a vanilla Perl 5 program might be even more cross-platform than a vanilla shell script is; shells come and go, but Perl 5 is forever, apparently.
[1]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/llms-make-per...
[2]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/what-programm...
Yes, I meant Perl 5. Raku is a totally different beast. I got interested in Perl exactly because of its scripting capabilities. I want to replace Bash, sed, awk, etc. with a single, more powerful, language (without having to remember a billion flags/strange syntax).
I think it's fascinating how well it integrates in a Unix system and I find it very nice how concise it can get.
I see! If that's your motivation then Perl sounds like it could be a nice fit for you. It is indeed exceptionally Unixy in my view.
It is unix.
"Perl 5 has been on the same major version for 30 years now"
I don't know that I would consider that accurate. 'Perl 5' is really no longer a version, but the language itself. It's had a lot of "major" releases over the last ~20 years and it's evolved significantly in that time. Sure, the language does prioritize backwards compatibility, but that is common among many programming languages. New features have been added regularly, however, and 'Modern Perl' brought around a lot of change in style and approach from the Perl of 30 years ago.