The word itself is basically a joke, sure, but it serves as a nice accumulation of letters that have a somewhat unexpected pronunciation, certainly a feature of the English language. Pronunciation and emphasis are pretty hard for non-native speakers, and the written form doesn't help that much. On the other hand of the Latin alphabet spectrum, there are languages like Vietnamese, where you've got a boatload of accents and diacritical marks to help with it.

Although I'm not sure whether describing Perl as the Vietnamese of programming languages would be a good selling point, so I'll stick with French ;)