Personally, I don't like Perl. But I still use Perl on full time job. It's just a historical reason. My predecessors wrote tightly coupled large code base in Perl. (and they are left. sigh.)

If you read an article like "Look! These big web applications use Perl! Perl is good!" on the Web, you should notice two things.

Large product's userbase that don't mean programming language's goodness

Many people uses Facebook and WordPress. But, it's not means that PHP is the best programming language.

The age of the application and the company

Probably, Perl is resonable choice in 90's or earlry 00's. But now, we have more choices. There is more than one way to do it. Right?

If you looking for a programming language for your new web application, I recommend that you read Why did Quora choose Python for its development? and Enginnering at BankSimple.