A thoughtful post, but I disagree. I don't see so much "knee-jerk defense of Perl" as (healthy) skepticism about the OP's assertion of the central importance of IDEs, threading, and GUI development. Sure, all three are considered sexy by large segments of the geek population, but, at least in the problem domains where I work, they're pretty thoroughly irrelevant.

The last time I used an IDE or had to deal with threading per se was in 2001 and I eventually abandoned the IDE (MS Visual Studio) on that project because it was getting in my way more often than it was helping. In the broader sense of concurrency that you brought up, that project was the last time I encountered something that called for anything beyond the ability to run multiple independent instances of a process or maybe occasionally fork a child to handle a large chunk of processing, then die. I don't think I've done a GUI since 1998 or 99 unless you count web pages or a trivial Perl/Tk project that I did just for the sake of seeing what it's like.

I suppose you could call this a reflexive defense of Perl, depending on how you look at it, but I don't think that would be accurate. It's much more a statement of "You think that stuff's so important, huh? Prove it." I don't deny that IDEs and GUI tools (both GUIs for development and tools for developing GUIs) would make it easier to attract new blood (albeit with swampyankee's caveat of IDEs tending to enable 'code now, think later' work styles) and being able to trivially create pervasively-threaded code would do wonders for buzzword-compliance, but I'm not convinced that these things would do anything to truly improve the language or the community.