[imiric]

> but with a more powerful foundation so you have the flexibility to go further.

The question is: should you?

I like Perl, but it itself has many warts that make maintaining a large codebase more of a nightmare than using C, and certainly more than most modern languages.

I agree with other commenters here that the tools Perl sought to replace are still used more than it. It has its niche of being excellent at text processing, and more capable than shell scripts at that task, but I'd think twice about reaching for it to build anything more complex than a shell script replacement. Especially in 2023.