I've used a couple of IDE's for Perl (PerlIDE and Komodo Personal), and they did nothing to help me program better. They were nice, and the access to some of the documentation was marginally better, but really it made almost no difference.

And this was the point of the article :-) Perl IDEs are not as useful as those in other languages. See my brief rant for an example of the time you could be saving.

I cannot imagine it becoming obsolete any time soon, unless someone comes up with a killer language that's a whole lot friendlier than Java

That'll be Ruby and Perl 6 :-)