Admittedly a good support community can assist any language because it reduces the work required to produce a result.

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).