The problem with overused phrases like "Best practice", is that they are so nubulous. The first problem is that you could seat 20 people in a room and say "We are going to tackle this project using best practices. Is everyone agreed?" and you would probably get 20 nods of agreement, all sincere. But if we could project each of the 20 mental visions of what that entailed into pictures, there would probably be 20 different pictures. There would be elements of agreement, but also elements where one person "Best practice" is another's "Not over my dead body!".

Extreme example. A son get called to active service in a war zone. Waving him off, the father gives him the best advice he can think of. "Stay alive!". On the surface, that's pretty hard to argue with. Then why do we give so many postumuos medals for bravery? Sometimes best practice defies generalities.

In programming, one persons best practice can be anothers nightmare and vice versa. Almost every new language, methodology, paradigm, culture or fad that comes along beleives it has found the "One right way". Some are more successful than others at gaining mindshare or market share, but every one is eventually superceded. One of the biggest reasons I like perl is that it doesn't ever claim, or even suggest that it is the only way, although there are those perl practitioners that try to. In fact, it promotes TIMTOWTDI from the outset.

Like everything else, Perl as we know it now will be superceded. There will be those that hang on to the past, and what they know, for fear of the new, but it will happen anyway. The best we can hope is that the same mind that gave us the perl we know, will be able to resist the pulls in every direction, and the voices that insist that there P6 must become their vision of the one true way, and stick with his previous successful formula of enabling many ways whilst dictating few.