My question is for anyone that opts to use perl in any field dominated by other languages. Does anyone else encounter ignorant stereotypes and criticism of perl?

I actually work in a field where perl used to be the lingua franca, but i still hear bias against perl sometimes. I build web-based intranet applications (which were practically invented with perl). Some of our clients are all for a Linux/Apache/mod_perl/MySQL solution (usually cause the price is right). But others balk at the idea of using anything other than a bought and paid for solution (usually MS based) (Of course, when you pay for it that means you have someone to yell at when it breaks, which can be an important sometimes).

Perl has a bad rep sometimes, I think the infamous Matt's Script Archive and the alot of massive spaghetti-code-style sys-admin/build scripts are partially to blame. But as we all know, a truely "talented" programmer can write really really really bad code in any language. Perl also was kind of slow to catch up on the OO thing, and to this day many people don't even know there is such a thing as OO Perl. Perl is experiencing a revivial of sorts with Bioinformics because it is the right tool for the job (text parsing ;-).

But the fact is you will likely find bias everywhere you go about everything you can possibly think of for the rest of your life. Humans are very opinionated animals and have a propensity to try shove their opinions down the throats of other humans. If your teacher downgraded you only for using perl, he is an ass. But i doubt that was the sole reason (no offense to you or your code), but still you may find it useful/informative to discuss it with him.