IMNSHO, one of Perl's greatest strengths is the ability to write useful code without having to know the whole language. It's that powerful. Another is that there is a whole lot of substance to the language, if you want to dive into deep waters.

Unfortunately, the simplicity of Perl means that some people will be satisfied with a low level of understanding, creating badly written code and so on. The criticism against Perl is misguided. There are bad scripts out there, not because Perl causes people to write bad programs, but because Perl doesn't force people to adhere to one way of doing things. Perl allows us to write bad code, and some of us do. It's an issue of freedom. We don't always use our freedom wisely, but that's not a fault of the concept of freedom itself.

Personally, I think you have a good point about ambassadorship. Bad coders are going to be cranking out garbage no matter what we do. We can stand by helplessly, or we can create and publicize good code, useful and well-written scripts and modules.

There is a well-worn saying that I like: "All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing". So - do we let the world go to hell, or do we try to do something to balance the "evil"?