I looked into this in great detail for a recent application I had to write for a variety of smart devices. It seems that Perl is not an option. here are my recomendations:

If you want it to you want it to run on both WinCE and Palm your best bet is SuperWaba which is a Java-sort-of-thing. While not ideal, you get the following benifits:

1.Cross platform
2.Somwhat sane develoment platform
3.Do not have to use Microsoft development tools (see #2).

If the above arguments did not convince you to not do what is listed below, read on

Another alternative is to try Visual Basic .NET (never look at MFC, it will crack your brain in two from the pure idiocy of its design). VB can suck too, but if you couple it with the the addons from openNETcf.org it isnt so bad. openNETcf is a "central repository for information and shared-source projects specifically targeting the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework".

Good luck.