Are you surprised? Eric Raymond has some strong biases, and one of them is a love of Python.

For another famous example of his biases, see the entry for OS/2. The fact is that OS/2 is much, much better than he lets on, but he is an old Unix hacker and things that came from the original evil empire often don't get a fair shake in his book.

Besides which, Perl isn't a perfect language. It is an extremely good tool. But no tool will last forever. And heck, even I have gotten irritated with Perl from time to time...