#2 is not about Perl, the language, at all, so let's leave it at that. #3 seems closely related to #2 -- it may be true that we, the Perl community, have not needed one else we would have created one.

It's not a Perl thing - it's an open source thing. People write code to scratch their particular itches. In the open source world frameworks tend to bubble up from the bottom, rather than be imposed from above.

However, a lot of us also have noticed how other "communities" have developed such frameworks and we have also acknowledged how they have benefited from this.

Like? I'm really not sure what kind of frameworks/communities you're talking about. In general anything with the label "enterprise" is something a company, rather than a community, has produced. It's a marketing term, not a technical term.

If you're talking about things like Rails and Zope then Perl has many similar projects like Maypole, Bricolage, Catalyst, OpenInteract, etc.

That leaves me with #1 and #5. Yes, single point of contact can be a huge issue. "Now, all those who have successfully and satisfactorily called in BEA/IBM/Microsoft/Adobe/Oracle/<your favorite large software developer> for support, please raise your hands... no one?... I thought so..."

I've had some really excellent support responses from Oracle and Sun in the past ;-)

But, as you say, the actual level of support is largely irrelevant. It's all about perception, and having somebody to blame.

Btw, while Ruby is indeed younger than Perl, Python is of about the same vintage. Even in the realm of opensource, non-commercial, non-officially-supported, high price software, "Zope," "Ruby on Rails," and "JBoss" get more name recognition and mileage than CPAN does, in my knowledge.

Now that's a much more interesting question. Although a more direct comparison would be why Rails and Zope gets more press than OpenInteract, Bricolage, Maypole, Catalyst, Krang, Bivio, AxKit, Mason, OpenFrame, etc.

Some reasons of the top of my head:

• TIMTOWTDI works against us. We have many different frameworks that work in interestingly different ways and so support is split. With Ruby almost everybody looks to Rails. With Python almost everybody looks to Zope.
• Perl 5 works against us. Lots of people hate it. Sometimes with good reason.
• Better marketing and presentation. Just compare rubyonrails.org with catalyst.perl.org.

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