There is no such thing as single 'perl community' with single voice.

Even accounting for laws of large numbers, members of this community change, some of them start their own churches, many new people come and go....

For example there is extremely large flurry of people with no UNIX background pouring in, this changes the language under our feet.

Perl IS extremely portable (not to small devices though, unfortunatelly, :( ), which is especially shocking when compared to java, which claims to be portable, while it won't run on half of platforms that perl happily supports (without claiming ultra-portability), but it changes from revision to revision.