It's really slow. Since time is money and people value things more when they pay more, people naturally place a high value on a board that performs really, really badly.

More seriously, I think it's just an outgrowth of a really good programming community, helped along by good policies and a generally hands-off approach. Larry has been known to say that he designed the Perl community in the same way he designed Perl. I'm not sure that's true, but if it is he did a good job.

-sam