I don't think that's true, although maybe you could define "Perl programmers" to include people who downloaded broken, insecure CGI scripts from Matt's Script Archive and made random changes to them until they seemed to work. Even a lot of those people relied on clpm for guidance—often asking questions rather than just lurking. As you can remember, we didn't have Stack Overflow at the time, or even PerlMonks, so clpm was pretty much the main public forum for people to ask questions or announce libraries. Corporate and academic institutions to support Perl basically didn't exist; perl.com was running off Tom Christiansen's home internet connection for several years.