When one is facing a competition, one has to admit it, to understand it is a good thing, but also to try not to lose ground. Many times two competitors each gain new users. Many times users are gained by one on the expense of the other. At the moment, Perl faces competition from Python, Ruby, Tcl, OCaml and some other minor players. Our most serious competitor is Python.
Now if you ask a common programmer who knows Perl and Python well enough what he thinks of both languages there are several possible answers. One is "I love perl and despise everything that is Python." (I fall into this camp) One is "Python rocks, while Perl is a hideous, ugly inconsistent language". (I know some people who think that way). And another common one is "Perl is OK. Python is OK. Perl is good for some things, python for others. I like them both". A less common one is "They are both stupid. C++/ Java/LISP is the ultimate language!".
Now it's hard to tell which person will tell you which. It depends on the character of the Person, what he was used to before, and many other factors. My mother language was BASIC, and so I found Perl highly attractive. Later on when I learned other paradigms (The SICP stuff, Lambda Calculus, Object Oriented Programming, FP, nested data structures, etc.) I could easily find them in Perl 5. But then there may be other BASIC hackers who would prefer Python or Ruby.
There are dog people who prefer Perl, and there are dog people who prefer Python. There are cat people who prefer Perl (like me), and there are cat people who prefer Python. Now, one can notice that the fact that Perl resembles a natural language, and it is possible to write with it in various styles (even mixing several styles in one program) make it highly attractive to people who like think about how they are going to write the code, and translate it naturally into code. People who like a strict syntax and conventions, an "everything is an object" concept, lack of "inelegant" features, and the "There's One Way to Do it" dogma prefer Python. Some people accept both opposing camps and like both languages
Many of the members of the Python camp are loud, keep professing the supposed advantages of its language, how maintainable the code can become, and how everyone is capable of understanding it. While Python has many features Perl does not yet have, it also does not have many others (here documents, labelled loops with breaking and continuing, a continue block, the use strict pragma and so forth). It also overloads every operator to many things: + can be used for both adding numbers, concatenating strings and concatenating arrays, three uses that are three different operators in Perl. The Perl people on the other hand take the "if you like programming in Python/C/C++/Java/Ruby/whatever, then hack on and stay cool".
I have already met two relative very young newbies whom I told that they should start with learning Perl, and they said "Perl? Why not Python?" Apparently, some people are under the impression that Perl is an inferior language to Python. It's very easy to get it. Eric Raymond recommends in the How to become a Hacker HOWTO to start with learning Python and then learn C/C++, Perl, LISP, Shell and Java. (and afterwards become familiar with other languages that are of lesser significance to the world). I would recommend someone to start with Perl instead, but this is a difference of opinions between me and Raymond, which is not productive to delve on. (He took the time to write the HOWTO and so he gets to endorse his own favourite)
My point in making Rindolf is to make sure it has most of the important features Python (and similar languages like Ruby, Tcl or Haskell) has and Perl does not. I'd hate to lose ground because someone tried to do something in Perl and did not. However, as opposed to Perl 5, I'm not going to be concerned with Java (enough to make the arrow operator a "."), C++ (which supports Object Oriented Programming roughly as much as COBOL supports Functional Programming), C#, Visual Basic, Smalltalk or any language that is nowhere near Perl and does not compete for the same niche.
The Perl niche is high-level languages optimized for writing a lot of code quickly, commonly referred to as "scripting languages". These are the languages that most people like for their day to day hacking, that can be used as substitute for shell scripts (like I did when I first worked as a web-technician on UNIX), and can be used for GUI programming, numerical programming (with some extensions), simple games, text processing (naturally), web scripting, automating system tasks, and almost anything where you can afford to spend some overhead and don't need every single CPU cycle. Perl 6 from my impression aims to feel the niche for every possible use under the sun. But we cannot invent a language that will be good for anything, just as we cannot invent such a screw-driver.