Perl is not that good a language though for practical purposes. The same way, a breadboard contraption is not what you want to ship as your hardware product, but without it, and the mistakes made and addressed while tinkering with it, the sleek consumer-grade PCB won't be possible to design.
With a team where everybody wrote it in a similar style, Perl did perfectly well. Mod_perl was fast. I liked Perl.
Then Django came out, and then Numpy, and Perl lost. But Python is still so incredibly slow....