This should probably be in Meditations.

I think perl has a few things going against it from a cultural perspective. It's not used for developing the basic tools, like operating systems, office applications and databases, or even games - so people might think that it's not a serious language. Also, while some may know about Amazon and others that run multi-million dollar businesses with Perl, in general it is seen as a web scripting language. It doesn't have the support of Microsoft so it doesn't get the shiny tools like Visual Studio except via third parties like ActiveState. Neither is it a Wirth language, so many computer scientists won't like it or teach about it (I have no experience with LISP so I can't compare it with that).

Finally, perhaps many coders aren't lazy enough. I know I often only write code to develop a big application or maintain an old one and I don't always use Perl for the little jobs, like generating test input or running batch jobs and stuff like that.