Perl is dead

[Jonathan Stowe]

2008/12/4 Greg McCarroll <greg at mccarroll.org.uk>:
>
> On 4 Dec 2008, at 16:28, Jonathan Stowe wrote:
>
>> 2008/12/4 Simon Wilcox <essuu at ourshack.com>:
>>>
>>> David Cantrell wrote:
>>>>
>>>> And no, setting up yet another blog aggregator or yet another obscure
>>>> site that occasionally publishes an article, those don't count.
>>>> perlbuzz's existence hasn't fixed any problems.
>>>
>>>
>> Yeah but from what I'm reading between the lines part of the problem
>> at least is that we are blogging and promoting inwardly on these kind
>> of sites in the first place, we put in a lot of effort to talk to
>> ourselves when we should be talking to the people who don't already
>> read those sites: people shouldn't be blogging about Perl on use.perl
>> they should be blogging about it elsewhere.
>
> And this is a sentiment made by Andy (one of the people behind PerlBuzz)
> in one of the articles on PerlBuzz,
>
>  http://perlbuzz.com/2008/05/perl-decentralize-diversify-colonize.html
>
> Personally, I don't think good Perl programmers have ever been just 'Perl
> programmers', they've been sysadmins, DBA's or functional and yet pragmatic
> programmers who have stumbled into Perl and often stuck around for one
> reason
> or another. Maybe they just were lazy and liked CPAN, or else they liked the
> people in the community.
>
> And I don't think the language matters as much as the spirit. But if the
> language
> is a vehicle for the spirit, then the way to promote it is by doing things
> that are outwardly facing. And by doing things I don't mean blogging about
> another
> internal (to Perl) module that is useful within Perl programming, I mean
> something
> that makes other technical and non-technical business/academic groups take
> notice.
>
> And this activity should be focused on the task at hand, not the publicity.
> There
> are ideas that can be help with the publicity; perhaps a tag on use perl
> blogs to
> indicate it's externally interesting or a clearing house for articles;
> leaving PerlBuzz
> and the use.perl frontpage to do the rest. But the key is to look outward
> and do
> interesting stuff.

Absolutely, if  "the perl community" is going to talk to the rest of
the world then it had better be something the rest of the world is
interested in or they are going to think you're a bunch of kooks.