I was in college 1999-2003, I did PHP in an internship, and then later did some Perl in one of my classes.
Perl (in my college class) was so incomprehensible that I decided that I would avoid it. I've never applied to a job that uses Perl, and never responded to a recruiter that was looking for a Perl engineer. I've never had to use it at work, and fortunately I've never worked with anyone who wanted to use it.
I think it's best to think of Perl as a transition technology.