On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 10:33:20AM -0500, Sean Quinlan wrote: > On Thu, 2005-03-03 at 09:56 -0500, Adam Turoff wrote: > > If Perl per se matters to you that much, then you should find some way > > to make it your day job. Find a new employer, start your own business, > > whatever it takes. > > > > s/Perl/(Bike Riding|Gardening|Cooking|Painting|Teaching|Filmmaking)/; as > > appropriate. There is nothing magical about Perl programming that makes > > it so very different than other pursuit. > > OK. But by that logic it's still a win for Perl to be more popular.
Yes, but it's not absolutely necessary, and focusing on popularity can be (and has been) a huge distraction. > Look, here's the thing that weirds me out the most about these threads. > You are a member of Perl Mongers. A group intended for Perl enthusiasts. Right. > A place for people who really like Perl to gather, exchange ideas, etc. > It really blows my mind that some people on this list seem really > interested in shooting down even the idea of trying to make Perl more > popular. Popularity is about making a large(r) group of people like, accept or adopt Perl. I can't control what other people do or think. I'm not going to waste my time trying to convince them. I use Perl because it's useful for me. I like to share my experiences with others who can learn from them. I like to read about the experiences of others so I can improve my own skills. With regards to advocacy, I've wasted more energy than I care to admit on "how to make Perl more popular". I've given up. Popularity is irrelevant. Doing cool stuff is what counts. Case in point: Haskell is about 10x more popular than it was a month ago, and about 100x more popular than it was a year ago. Is it because of some grassroots Haskell advocacy campaign? Nope. It's because of two projects: darcs and pugs. > But I can't get my mind around WHY the very _concept_ of trying to grow > Perl seems so awful to some. Particularly on a list like Boston.pm. Why > are you here if you think Perl _should_ fade into obscurity? Maybe I'm > getting the wrong impression, but if that's the way you feel, beat the > curve - leave. What are you afraid of?!?! It's not the concept of trying to grow Perl, it's the means. Advocacy doesn't work, at least compared to empowerment. It doesn't mean anything if I have a message to pitch to you that Perl makes your pain go away. It matters a whole lot more if I _show_ you how Perl makes your pain go away, or empower you to pick up some Perl tool to make your pain go away. > > If Perl per se matters to you that much, then you should find some > > way to make it your day job. Find a new employer, start your own > > business, whatever it takes. > > What the heck do you think we're trying to do? Discuss advocacy and popularity at the expense of building cool tools with Perl. Case in point: Yesterday, I picked up a copy of Markdown. It's really god-awful Perl code, but it does something very important to me: convert a plain text format into reasonable HTML. I don't care that it's not on CPAN. I don't care that it's a hack. I want something that helps me write quick a few little docs without starting Word, dusting off DocBook or firing up [La]TeX. Z. _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
