[jrockway]

I agree with you up until "There's just not a critical mass (left) in the Perl community who believe that the target audience of their code is the next programmer who works on it."

I think those people left and moved to PHP. All that's left in the Perl community are a bunch of people who think tests and readable modular code are good. (Not everyone implements this really well, but at least it's in mind.)

And by community, I mean "people that write CPAN modules and hang out on IRC", not "people that submitted their resume to the open 'PERL' position". Those people are more than happy to write spaghetti, but it's because the market allows it. Start firing people for writing crap code, and start paying the people that write great code a lot of money, and you'll see a lot of great code -- Perl or otherwise. As it stands now, code quality and pay are not linked, so there is a lot of bad code being written for a lot of money.

(Ask me about 10,000 lines of C++ to encrypt a password and send it over a socket...)