Re: Red Hat
can't comment on that question with confidence since I haven't been in the programming scene for a few years, but I have personally not come across anything as light-weight, versatile, and full-featured as Perl. As an interpreted dynamic language there aren't a lot of other contenders to consider.
Last I heard, Perl was still being used in a lot of mission-critical production environments at major institutions like NASA, DoD and NSF... so that makes me think that it isn't obsolete just yet.
May be PM or someone else can confirm or refute my opinion.