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.