There seems to be an implicit "friendliness" to perl and the perl community.
I think this is a surprisingly large part of the perl mind-set.
It seems to be exuded from several sources:
humour in the docs/man pages
the non-judgemental syntax ("There's more than 1 way to do it.")
well-known personalities (Larry, TomC, ...)
helpful user community (like perlmonks, and comp.lang.perl.*)