When I was doing undergrad CS in 2006, we had a choice between Perl and Python for our scripting assignments. As far as I know, no one chose Perl. It's comparatively a huge pain to get ramped up on, and the promised payoff is that you get all these implicitly stateful sigils that let you write contest-winning one-liners. But by the early 2000's, the culture was getting up to speed on obvious-in-retrospect principles like "avoid global variables" and "you should give your variables names that someone else can understand", and even as students we could all see that Perl wasn't going to be the future.