good beer, mountain biking, snowboarding, gaming, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek etc...

i can tell you that i do believe there is a perl community, and that it is a lot of why the language is good; but i can also tell you that if you think this list above has anything to do with it, you're smoking the bad crack. a lot of programmers like good beer; then again, a lot of non-programmers like good beer. i hate beer, and love perl. ditto mountain biking and snowboarding. i like gaming, but certainly it is not a prerequisite for writing perl. i like science fiction and fantasy novels, but not all sci-fi fans are hackers.

that said, what does bring us together? what i think we do share is two-fold:

1. Programmer-nature: we like to take logical approaches to complex problems, think about things in that particular analytic manner that leads to algorithmic solutions. this leads some of us to laziness, impatience, and|or hubris.
2. Artist-nature: i think it is no coincidence that the perl license is called the artistic license. perl moreso than most languages is a medium of expression of art and beauty; golf is an example of that, as are obfuscation and poetry. there is an aesthetic sense to perl. for any given problem, there are solutions which are elegant, and solutions which are not. this is not so much the case in other laguages.

these two things, the perl logic and the perl aesthetic, the perl left brain and the perl right brain, tend to cause certain things in conjunction together -- a love of puns, for instance -- but by no means are all the possible side effects of these two things necessary in each member of the community.

and i think the one single most important thing that makes the perl community the way best programming community is that the community is appreciated, known, and encouraged in a way that it might not have been. it is self-reinforcing. we love the community, so we give to the community, and the community gives to the newbie and to us, and the newbie feels the love of the community and, in turn, loves the community, and so on.

thus, greatness.