Stockholm Syndrome implies that Perl is bad, no?

I disagree. Just as it allows you to write horrible stuff, you can just as well get your shit together and do it maintainable, robust and nice to the eye :)

And as the author states, you (almost) always have an choice to run other languages, where perl runs. Not really a hostage situation, methinks.

Edit: Not that I particularly like Perl, but neither do I hate it. I think it's somewhat bad reputation stems more from the fact, as described above, that it forces you less to do things nicely and is very accessible to the, let's say, less experiences programmers - so a lot of quickly cobbled together stuff flies around.