I have peen a programmer since before there were microprocessors. Sometimes the work was fun, sometimes drudgery. During that time I never experienced the sense of community I see in the Perl world. Yes, Perl is a language to get the work done. Yes it has made boring work easy for me. But Perl is also a community of people, whom I only know or know about on-line, but those whom I wouldn't mind knowing better.

That's not always true of any community. IMHO, the community is the true value of Perl. Everything else is just syntax.