When I started with Perl, the manpage was only 10 pages long. There wasn't enough of it to be intimidating. {grin}

Mostly what I find intimidating now are the people who look at Perl golf and Perl JAPHs and the slapped-together perl4-style CGI scripts and think that this is "normal" Perl. If I could eliminate those items from the Perl culture, I think we'd have fewer people intimidated by Perl in general.

One of my clients is in the upper half of the Fortune 500, and makes half of their revenue from tens of thousands of lines of Perl code deployed as mod_perl web servers and web services, and infrastructure support. And no, they're not running out to replace it with Java or Python or Ruby on Rails. In fact, they're writing a lot more Perl to go with it. Yeay. But why it works is because they have a great design, testing, and deployment strategy, which they would need for any large project in any programming language. Perl is never the issue when you have the rest of the infrastructure in place.