Markets are mindless; they no more understand Perl than weather understands birds (i.e., "markets" are just an environment in which Perl programmers try to find work.).

Programmers -- especially beginning programmers -- frequently conflate a language (Perl, Java, COBOL, INTERCAL) with programming. This is a mistake: programming languages are tools for programmers; they are not programming, in the same way that T-squares, pencils, and triangles (and ducks and splines) were tools for designers, but aren't design. Designing good programs is difficult (NP-hard 8-)). It may be easier to code them in Perl than in Ook, but the design skills are quite a lot harder to learn than a new language. Concentrate on those.

Employers (at least US employers) do tend to look for specific skill sets, mostly because the corporate culture of treating skilled employees as disposable has caused most sensible people to treat employers in the same way. Conversely, employees have to fit into a working environment. See, for example Skud Robert's geek ettiquette site.

There are also many important programming issues that have absolutely nothing to do with the language used for coding:

• Documentation. Bad documentation (my current bête noire is one of the commercial installation building programs) can make using a program painful. Documentation includes that for end users (customers, those people from whom the money for your paycheck comes) and that for maintenance programmers (I've dealt with code that originated in the mid 1950's).
• Specifications. This is what your customers want; it's a programmer's responsibility to make sure s?he understands their needs and that their needs are realizable.
• Team work. Most large programs are not created by an eremitic monk with a laptop and a brilliant idea. Maybe that's how Knuth came up with TeX and Larry Wall created Perl, but it sure is not how quite a few other programs came to be. See, for example, NASTRAN, and CCSM

Incidentally, your title can be read to be "the market is stupid because it understands Perl." You may have meant "Market is too stupid to understand Perl."

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