Actually I never used this argument for Perl. Perl was not really used for things like big data or high performance backend applications. You can use this reasoning for C++ or C# on the other hand and it stands. Many "big data" things re in C++ and a lot of high performance projects out there.

If you want to compare nifty scripting languages than you can compare Perl with Ruby or Python. In 2008 I was happily using Ruby for most of things we used to do in Perl, a bit slower yes, but who cared and it was much more readable.