"As any cognitive science expert will tell you, fun is a great way to focus the mind. Developers that aren’t enjoying themselves will slow down, write buggy code, make poor decisions, and eventually leave the project (even one that pays). Conversely, rampant fun will bring coders in droves, and give them a passion for their work that shows in quality, quantity, and goodwill. It’s a pretty good bet that optimizing for fun will produce a better product than almost any other method." ~~ Geoff Broadwell, in an O'Reilly article -Ofun, published back in 2005. http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2005/10/ofun.html
That was written in 2005 about one project. What if more Perl projects started explicitly applying these principles?