> I think there is some "reverse network effect" for Perl, where people might enjoy writing in the language but nobody enjoys having to maintain Perl written by someone else.
I think you might be right. Perl is a lot of fun to write, and it's still my language of choice for log parsing and automating sys admin stuff, but while it's possible to write Perl in a way that's easy for others to maintain and understand most people don't (less fun?) and for small projects it's even sometimes faster to rewrite something than mess with what someone else left you.
Actually... now that I think about it, is it ever a joy to work with someone else's mess in any language?
