I don't think a more difficult question could be asked. For of all the places I've lurked and enquired no community has been more responsive, ingenious, or intriguing as the Perl community. I've learned more about code and the art of code (no matter what the language) through my association with Perl folks.

However, ( Inserts foot in open can of worms -- eew ), There is one area that only fans the flames of Perl detractors -- lack of standards. It's a difficult issue for the Perl community to resolve as the P5EE group has found. However without them I see no way that managers in large corporations will ever find it a maintainable practical language for anything other than batch and system scripting.

In my own expierience I wrote a large well documented, modularized, extensible Perl application that since being passed on to others to maintain has become unreadable undocumented code due to the the motivation to create job security for the ones that took over the application. As the managers only see code that looks obtuse and complicated it is shunned, but because it has become so vital it is maintained.

The lack of ability for managers to have understandable standards by which they can set expectations on Perl applications is something the Perl community really needs to figure out how to meld into TMTOWTDI. If it were any other community than the Perl community I would think this is impossible.