In fact, this is why we all use standard power sockets in any one country - compatibility and reuse. Often there are different ways of doing something, yet we settle on one particular way, and the gains we get from all sharing a particular standard or technique outweighs the potential benefits from a better more customised solution.

IPv4 is another example of an older protocol for which potentially superior alternatives exist (e.g. IPv6). The trouble is, in the time it has taken for the world to mumble over whether to switch over to IPv6, the IPv4 protocol has had a number of bolt-ons (NAT, diffserv, MPLS) to work-around existing limitations.

When something has enough inertia that a major change is terrifically painful (e.g. IPv4->IPv6, changing driving on the right side of the road to the left, Perl5->Perl6) often the existing method is hacked to get around the problems.

This leads to the concept of evolution vs revolution - taking something existing and relied upon, and incrementally changing it as required..

So Perl has an incredible community; that does make it difficult for any new language to enter the world with payoffs comparable to what can be performed by Perl. Tis the way of the world.

Yet it's not impossible - over time Linux has evolved from an experiment to a major force. Times change and small ideas can gain momentum. But it takes a while.

And Perl is quite a good language anyway; perhaps that attracts those that makes the Perl community such a strong one (although Bush is running America, which proves that it doesn't take something good to amass a large support base).

You have hit it right on the head. Perl does offer a great deal, but what made the difference to me was the community. If I have a question (and I have plenty), I know I can come here and ask. Provided I do some work and ask something halfway intelligent, I am likely to get a bunch of reasonable, useful answers. I've never seen this with other languages. I've never found, say, a C++ community. This is one of the most important things about Perl that makes it so useful. It's the people who are using it, who are willing to help others learn it.

Actually, on that point, I suspect that the Perl community is sufficiently small to have a common gathering point (e.g. perlmonks), and large enough to make that community a strong force.

I suspect the C++ user-base, on the other hand, is a magnitude in size larger and hence has many segmented communities. Newsgroups have commonly been a community gathering point for many well-established languages, and some excellent user manuals have been written by language developers in the 80s and 90s for the likes of C and C++.

There exist, nowadays, some other web site based forums although few of these are well designed - most rely heavily on graphics to "look cool" while significantly detracting from functionality - perlmonks is a very functional, almost twiki-like, site -- and this really makes this a great gathering point.

It's more than just the community I think. In 2000-2001 I used a lot of perl. Later on I moved to python and even tried ruby beginning this year.

I came back to perl. Why? Well, using python and or ruby was like reinventing the wheel. I knew I already did all the stuff the python and ruby books taught me.