To me it sounds like a distortion of the truth: Perl was instrumental in spurring the modern dynamic language movement, but it in itself is all but dead. Perl (and I mean Perl5) is antiquated, and no modern shop I'm aware of uses it. There are always exceptions, but I don't see a lot of job postings looking for Perl programmers. Ruby, Python, et al, sure.

Perl is all but dead because Larry Wall, Perl's developer, thought it'd be a good idea to let someone else implement his spec for Perl 6. There were some attempts, and you can argue about their success, but the fact that there is no reference implementation is what killed Perl. The Perl community argued and thrashed and screamed about Perl 6, and meanwhile, Python and Ruby developed vibrant communities, and most serious Perl programmers I know simply migrated to one of the new, more developed languages.

I suppose what this guy is really saying is that Perl 5 died around the time of the dot-com bust. But correlation does not equal causation; Perl killed itself.