A good head start? Heck, Perl is halfway through the race! I do agree that community and documentation are very important to the usability and popularity of a language, and I don't think all other popular languages will just 'catch up' with time. For example, C predates Perl by a long time, yet is still very distributed, and greatly lacks the unity of Perl's community. Perl has both CPAN and perldoc, very strong resources. For a language to catch up to Perl in terms of community, leaders will have to implement the structure for a community, and not just expect time to lay it in place.