From the perspective of someone who's just getting started with learning to code, perl seems like a pile of spermaceti: was once very important, could be turned into beautifully smelling products so long as you didn't pay too much attention to the production process, and no longer needed because of modern synthetics :)

But I've only ever read people mocking perl, never built anything with it. It appears immensely powerful, but collapsing arrays by default makes no sense at all.