While you and I might be very comfortable plucking the good stuff from CPAN (or rolling our own) there is a large number of would-be Perl users that are intimidated by the vast number of options.

So what? Perl can't be all things to all people. I see absolutely no problem with sending people that can't deal with CPAN to Ruby or PHP. I'd certainly rather do that than lose anything from CPAN. All that diversity is what makes it go!

I think that if there were a kind of "Training Wheels Perl" environment that included the kinds of things people are doing with Ruby and PHP without too much pain, we would see Perl begin to gain in popularity with the newcomers. Perl could lose that "Difficult" image it has picked up.

I doubt it, but feel free to set one up and give it a try. Think of the fame and glory! You might want to re-name Perl while you're at it - the accumulated reputation isn't going to help you sell it as the new hotness. "Perl Lite" perhaps?

Sure, maybe it's just marketing, but I know what I'm doing and it still takes me a few hours to go from a fresh install of CentOS/RHEL/Ubuntu/Fedora/whatever to a working server with the following installed:

A few hours? What are you complaining about? You should try to get all that going with Ruby or PHP sometime! I think you'll be surprised by how hard it is.

-sam