I've been programming exclusively in Perl for over 4 years and on and off for 8 years prior to that. I have never once programmed anything threaded. Ever. In fact, I would say that most programmers in the world have never knowingly handled threading issues.

I've been programming Perl for 10 years now, but I've never programmed anything with mod_perl or the DBI. Ever. And that's probably true for most programmers in the world. But that doesn't mean that mod_perl or the DBI aren't hot or important.

It doesn't matter whether programmers get it right. Fact is, there is a demand for threaded applications. Whether it's useful or not. And when programmed right, threading in Java works a lot more efficient than in Perl (where threads is such a bane that by default if you compile Perl, threads are disabled). It's like vitamine pills. Whether they work or not - there's a demand for them. And that (partially) explains why Java is "bigger" than Perl.

As for Unicode, I don't have my p5p archive here, and I'm not going to look up the online archives, but there are still a lot of bugs/glitches coming by on the mailinglist.