I don't think you could be more incorrect, the community in my experience has been nothing but friendly and helpful. I'm not a programmer by training, I haven't been in the Perl for long so I can't speak for how it used to be BUT the Perl community is one of the reasons I'm a semi-competent programmer today. The community has helped me work out problems with my code and taught me things about Perl that has been essential for my research work for free. The only people I hear say anything negative about Perl-users and the community are trolls or those that have very little experience with the community.