I think that at the start of the Perl 6 project, the thought was that the community would have substantial input into the next version of Perl and may even take over the bulk of the development from Larry Wall and his small coterie; transform from the cathedral to the baazar in the design space, too.

It hasn't really worked out that way. Although there was a tremendous amount of input from the community in the form of suggestions for Perl6, it turned out that it is really hard to design a coherent language by community. So by universal acclimation, Larry once again became the lead designer and arbiter of good linguistic taste. Ironically, the perl6 community process has made more work for Larry, not less...

I don't see any major problems with the Perl community. But one could always suggest improvements.

One thing I would like to see is a site (or a section of Perlmonks) with an active community of module reviewers. CPAN is an embarassment of riches these days. Whether you want to multiply a matrix, create a template, parse a log, or train a neural network, there are multiple modules available and little information discussing their relative merits. Something like a Hitchhiker's Guide to CPAN would be useful in making sense of it all.

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