It could have been written: "The world uses Perl to:" And mean the same thing, in English.
Not really, no. It's rather the opposite. Saying "X needs to Y" implies quite strongly that X does not currently do Y.
In search of a concrete, real-world example, I just ran a search on "the world needs to" and my first hit is an article headlined "the world needs to store billions of tons of carbon". The actual article is, unfortunately, paywalled, so I can't readily read the full content, but I can pretty much guarantee you that the article isn't talking about how wonderful it is that billions of tons of carbon are being stored successfully and effectively.
