I've seen estimates of the number of Perl programmers to be somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000. My estimate is that the number of people that are part of the "community" are at most a few thousand, of which most aren't "making a contribution".

If I look around me at my current employers, and several of my previous employers, there are Perl programmers (and people programming in Perl) at all of them. Except myself, none had any interest in participating in "the community".

Besides Perl, I also use (or have used) C, shell, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, MySQL, Sybase, awk and a few other things a lot. I've never been involved in their communities either.