I think for a lot of "corporate-type programers" Perl is intimidating, so they choose to believe the FUD.

The same features that make it so endearing to most of us here in the Monastery make it suspect for them:

• TMTOWTDI might be what we like about Perl, but it scares the Hell out of most of the World,
• Perl gives you Freedom, but with Freedom comes responsabilities, which sounds like "I'll be fired if I fail" to a lot of professional programers,

  I am sure we all agree that indeed there is a Poetry of Programming, but that sounds like anathema to a lot of Java-heads.

I could go on like this, but it mostly boils down to "I have learnt Java in school, why should I learn something else" and finally to "nobody has ever been fired for using Java".

Once they believe in this, then they have to justify this cultural reaction, and come up with tons of mostly-invalid-but-serious-sounding reasons.

BTW, Amazon.com runs on Perl, CNNSI uses it a lot, I had people from Boing attend a Perl class, and sure, Yahoo is moving away from Perl, but their plan is to use ... PHP! So scalability does not seem to be a problem for some rather huge organizations.