People like Cold Fusion for the same reasons they like PHP. Cold Fusion is very easy to learn and designed strictly for the Web. Perl, on the other hand, is a general purpose programming language like Java or C++.

PHP is more popular than Cold Fusion mostly because PHP is free. It should be noted that every day, PHP is looking more like Perl. PHP is slowly becoming a general purpose language. You can now use it for shell scripting and GUI work. Why is this happening to PHP? Because people realize that there are major advantages to using a language that is flexible. As others have pointed out, you can use Perl for both backend and frontend development. Perl is probably the most flexible language on the planet, and it will only become more flexible in version 6.