Perl is what I use for my new initiatives, and it's a choice I've made through careful consideration of many alternatives. Perl has the right "balance" of languages features for web applications.

Some options I've tried and what I didn't like:

Haskell is much faster and a better language in general, but just doesn't have enough usable libraries for writing web applications. (My first Haskell web application was an application that generated an image of the latest Twitter post from a user using a given hashtag. It went together quickly enough, but I didn't really feel like "wow, this was a great web development experience that has changed my life". I do feel that way about Haskell for text processing and system programming, ironically. It definitely beats Perl there. But for simple and complex web applications, Perl is much better.)

CL has the best development tools of any language, so I really wanted to like it, but it doesn't really have a coherent community. I started writing a web application in CL to allow clients to email us files, even when they were behind a firewall that blocked outgoing email and ftp (!). This didn't go too well; I really didn't like cl-who or html-template, and there were no other options. (People in #lisp agreed with me, but their advice was to "just write my own". The answer to every question about libraries on #lisp is "just write your own".) I started porting Template::Refine from Perl to CL (see template-refine and cl-template-refine on my github), so I could generate HTML. closure-xml and cl-stp are great XML libraries, BTW. The next thing I wanted was a dependency-injection framework. There were no libraries for that, so I had to "just write my own". cl-junkie is on my github (junkie, "dependency injection", get it?), but I got bored and didn't finish it. I ended up not needing the app anyway. Too much yak-shaving lets you get over the excitement of your actual idea, and leads to it never being done. With Perl I can get a working application before I am not excited anymore. (Then I get excited about cleaning up the libraries, and do that afterwards. Bootstrapping++)

Moving along, there is Scala and Clojure. Scala is a fine langauge, it really "gets" functional programming. Clojure is not to my liking. (And it's not the parentheses; I have a shit-ton of "production" Emacs Lisp lying around.)

These languages are both cases of the "oh, just write your own libraries" community problem. Even worse is the potential to reuse Java libraries. I don't see the point of using a nice functional language with overly-verbose libraries that are going to randomly throw NullPointerExceptions. Many other problems I have with Java carry over to Scala and Clojure if you use Java libraries. (Design pattern overload, extremely poor object system, no types that cannot be null, etc.)

(I know I said "bootstrapping++" above, and that you can bootstrap clean Scala/Clojure libraries off the messy Java ones. But it's just too painful for me. It's not boring, it's just pure pain.)

I use Scala for Android applications simply because there is absolutely no other option. (I couldn't get any Clojure code to compile, and I am certainly not going to use plain Java. I prefer Scala to both anyway, but obviously I would prefer various non-JVM languages to those.)

So then there are Ruby and Python. Both are basically Perl with very tiny superficial differences, so there is no reason to waste my time becoming good at those. (Similarly, if you are a Ruby guru, you will probably not be too excited to switch to Perl. Same language, except you aren't a guru anymore.) I think Perl's libraries are, in general, more extensive and more mature than Python or Ruby's. But for the beaten path, you will do fine with any. Ruby has this "Rails" thing that I hear is pretty popular.

One thing I've noticed, though, is that the Perl community is better at stealing from Ruby and Python than those communities are at stealing from us. DBIx::Class is significantly more advanced than any Python or Ruby ORM that I know of, KiokuDB is the only sane object database among those three languages, etc., etc. But Ruby and Python still don't have anything close. OTOH, Python's WSGI and Ruby's Rack are great ideas... so the Perl community now has PSGI and Plack. So you can see why I find it compelling to stick with Perl. Good ideas eventually migrate over here, and the community supports them.

Anyway, if I had a point, it's that there is no reason to disqualify Perl from "what should I write my new app in" discussions, except ignorance. Perl has its tradeoffs, but so does anything else available. (Don't let "I last used Perl in 1995, so Perl must still be the same as it was in 1995," ruin your next application development project!)