For the language itself, maybe. But never discourage people from learning something new. He seems to be excited and has motivation. There are also lot of legacy code, which would never get ported or maintained if nobody learns the language anymore, only a few old people at that point (look what happens to COBOL).

I learend it in the 90s, and was working on a large Perl codebase 2005 and a couple of years forward. And 20 years, it still started to feel dated, and 15 years ago it was just so out dated it hurt. So, starting to learn Perl 20 years ago would not have been great :) However, the things making Perl horrible, is pretty much threre in Python also with the addition of significant whitespace... so technically, going from Python to Perl might actually be a step in the right direction.... Now, if you excuse me, I will hide behinde this huge rock for a while to let the incoming projectiles settle.