I've had some experience with perl. While it has a lot of advantages (most of them are described in your post) it clumsily support OOP and is very hard to maintain. It's true that perl gets you going pretty fast, But once your code base reaches several hundred classes, you'll really regret ever considering it for production.

As a grad student I found myself using it quite a lot for writing quick and dirty scripts for data manipulation until I finally decided to move to python. Since then, I never look back :-)