It might be worth noting that Perl is simply stronger than it appears. The community has very easy ways to communicate information, since Perl has a very good i

It might be worth noting that Perl is simply stronger than it appears. The community has very easy ways to communicate information, since Perl has a very good infrastructure. CPAN is easy and doesn't distinguish between rank or other privileges; there's RSS feeds for about everything and you can get a large crowd simply by releasing; Many forms of bugs that are dependent on architecture/environment can be caught by automated testing, or by community members reporting their installation logs through their CPAN client; We still use mailing lists (some of which are closed) because they're easy to manage and are well suited for long big-traffic discussions; we use IRC because of its advantages, and many early developments happen on irc.perl.org, separated from the rest of the IRC world (this isn't bad, just a simple reason); We didn't do forums and online communities that well in the past, but it's starting. There is PerlMonks, but it was always very Perl-specific. Blogging has been adopted by the community a lot, and you can feel its impact when you see more and more people asking about the projects the community enjoys the most at the time (Moose, Catalyst, Dist-Zilla & Co). I heard "Yea, we still make heavy use of Perl in our company, but we didn't follow the community, because isn't Perl on a decline?" many times at CeBit this year. So it's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. Overcoming it isn't an easy task, but we're heading in the right direction and there's a couple of very smart people working on it.