Noting my post on how the web was lost, Sam Crawley has asked "Can Perl ever regain its reputation?", ending with:

Yes, it does matter, not only for emotional and stubborn reasons, but also for rational and pragmatic ones.

• Developer mindshare

  The Perl community is driven by developers, mostly working under FOSS licenses. If the first thing new developers hear about Perl are horror stories about "executable line noise" and "write-only code", then they will not be inclined to learn or use the language beyond the absolute minimum that may be required of them, if at all. Without fresh blood, the community will eventually stagnate and die, regardless of the advances being made by the old guard today.

• Management mindshare

  The people responsible for making technology decisions are often only passingly familiar with the technology itself and must rely on the reputation of candidate technologies to make those decisions. If Perl has a reputation of
  

  A recent Twitter search result wrote:

  You're doing a large project in perl? There's your first mistake.

  then they won't create Perl programming jobs, further reducing developers' interest in learning and mastering the language.

• Negative characterization of the community

  In one of the replies to my previous post, "Programmer" asserted that Perl developers are "trying to stick in the past" and that we "fear learning something new". Aside from the emotional distaste at being insulted in that manner, there's also the pragmatic point that, if hiring managers or potential clients believe we're stuck in the past and afraid of change, then being known as a Perl developer could be a poison pill, making it more difficult to find non-Perl work as well.
  

If you can think of any other reasons it's important to improve Perl's reputation, please add them in a comment. Everything else I can come up with at the moment seems to fall under those three.