This article is from 1998. A lot has changed since then: Ruby, alternate JVM languages like Clojure and Scala, C#, Perl 6... If I were to make a sweeping historical characterization, I would say that Perl was exactly what people needed in the 1990s when everything was new and nothing worked with anything else and everyone needed lots of duct tape and Perl's wonderful concise syntax made excellent duct tape. I used it during that period, but I just don't use it much anymore.