Well in fairness it is an easy (so altogether too common) mistake to make, after all in Programming Perl:

To those who merely like it, Perl is the Practical Extraction and Report Language. To those who love it, Perl is the Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister. And to the minimalists in the crowd, Perl seems like a pointless exercise in redundancy.....

So I guess some people didn't see the joke and think its a misspelled acronym (not all caps) :P.