I think the entire point on TMTOWTDI is that we couldn't know which is a Best Practice without knowing the possibilities. Perl is a human language in this sense, with different accents, dialets...

The big thing here is that even if from the 9 ways of doing something, 8 of them are no good, this means that this was a cultural learning about ourselves more than about the language itself.

Consider object orientation. How many dialets are in that field in CPAN? Is this good? Well, some of them become more standard, some of them just is almost never used, some of them become the Bast Practice (as of DBI, DBIx::Class, TT).

Just to think about: Could "Perl Best Practices" be written without TMTOWTDI? Could Perl be better than the today's known Best Practices without the cultural evaluation of the choices?