My last two jobs were at Perl/JS startups.

Perl is one of the best choices for a start-up because it's amazingly fast for for prototyping, it covers so much ground, and is such good glue.

During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. [I would look] at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers... –Beating the Averages

(update: fixed bracket HTML.)

That note from Paul Graham, is not about using 'Perl' in specific. He seems to be trying to point out the fact that technically oriented people, will tend to use the current set of non-mainstream technologies against the current enterprise trends even if they are relatively new. If you apply that line of thinking. Python/Perl are the new C++/Java of our times. C++/Java have graduated to COBOL level ancientness by now.

Yes, Perl is still awesome. But the world now takes many things we offer for granted, Because nearly every half decent language these days has those features. The situation is not like what it was 20 years back. We have some marginal advantages over other languages, in the exact same way they have some other advantages over us. But its not like what it was 20 years back, where Perl was the only alternative available.

The situation with many other languages like Python is no different. And they too losing users to languages like Go and Scala. But just like how CGI, gave Perl some breathing time. So will Django and Rails give Python and Ruby some breathing time.

We have nothing radically new to offer for years now. There is incremental development. But that is that. This is really the reason why Perl 6 is all the more so important for Perl.

What do you see as the radically new features Go and Scala have? And what do you see as possible with Perl6, in theory, that isn't possible with Perl5?

I rather read his article as "if you choose tools/programming languages that are the industry standard, you get industry-standard employees and industry-standard (=average) code; if you choose tools/languages that are the exception, you might get exceptional code."

Basically, one type of employer is playing it safe and the other is taking a gamble.