I certainly agree that managers should choose the languages with good tools, but I think Perl came to that game pretty late. Over the past couple of years we've gotten a lot better, certainly, but that's pretty recent.
Honestly, we have to admit that for a very long time we (as a community) promoted Perl as a language that didn't need tools: you could just use your favorite text editor and command line. Beyond that, we really didn't provide that much. In my opinion, there still isn't a good Perl project tool. We have debuggers and code editors, but not something that can look at the whole project. Some people like EPIC, but is that really the best we can do? Komodo recently made its way to Mac OS X, but I haven't tried the latest version yet.
So, I'm pretty sure we agree and that we're just talking about different sides of the same thing. Maybe we need a guide to Perl programming in the spirit of Sam Tregar's "Writing Perl Modules for CPAN" that takes the user all the way from logging in, writing code, testing, and so on all the way up to releasing it. Along the way we show all of the tools and provide crib notes for managers about what they should be doing at that point. Maybe we call it "The Practice of Perl Programming" :)
