[pellicle]

So, do you think the key to Perl 6's success is to avoid that? That is, do you think it's better for Perl 6 to have a smaller, more seasoned developer community in the beginning (to establish some best-practices before the rest of us join in)?

[chromatic]

Unless you manage to pull every novice, dabbler, and new developer into the community and teach those best practices from the start, you won't solve the problem on a large scale. Programming -- especially the realm of informal, ad hoc programming so well served by dynamic languages -- rewards individual exploration. You don't have to write elegant Python or Ruby or PHP or Perl to get your job done, and you don't have to learn a lot of theory to accomplish a task. You may make a mess, but it's not clear that novices care about that. Why should they?

Perl 6 has an advantage in that most of the tutorials and examples aren't full of bad examples and muddled thinking like most of the Perl 5 tutorials and examples are. I don't expect that to last, but hopefully some thoughtful language design will make abusing the language much more difficult.

[Kaizyn]

No, the key to Perl 6's success is to convince all of the Perl 5 developers to move on to the new language. Also, if they (the Perl coders) go on a binge and port all the CPAN libraries over to Perl 6, that will help.