Perl is just one of the very many languages you can use to communicate with computers and other programmers. Well written perl is usually easy to read and generally blazing fast, but not all that easy to write. Some of the old-fashioned constructs (especially the more low-level syscalls, like the File/Net/IO operators) get in the way of doing things intuitively. Also, IMHO perl's OO support is just barely sufficient.

From what I've seen, perl 6 will fix a lot of the issues, but I really have no clue when it'll be released. On the other hand, if I need a language that has really good OO support right now, I'll just use Ruby. If I need a language that will give me speed and portability, I'll use C (with or without Perl/XS). If I need something to install on a bog-standard Win2000 server, i'll use Visual Basic. There have even be a few projects where Java was a good choice.

The point is, use the right language that works for you and your project. Ruby sucks at unicode but has terrific OO. Perl is sometimes inconsistent and can definitely be ugly but it has CPAN, is available on all UNIXes, easy (for me) to write and it's fast. Java is too much typing but it has pretty good threading and corporate support. C is hard to get right but works everywhere. Javascript has closures and a neat OO model but the syntax is ugly as hell.

In other words, pick the posion that will do the least damage :-)