Hah. Well, Perl isn't a bad language, it's just past its prime and being outcompeted by other languages. It had a moment where it could have remained relevant but they missed it.
Better OO than the competing scripting languages, CPAN still beats any opposition (check CPAN testers), extensible syntax(!) etc.
And... you don't lose a hype war if you didn't really play it.
http://dheeb.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/gbu.pdf
Perl does Unicode right. Look at page #3.
Anyway, I thought Guido told 'em to stop, since they're getting a bad reputation?