On Thu, 3 Mar 2005, Greg London wrote:
> Adam Turoff said:
> > On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 10:33:20AM -0500, Sean Quinlan 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.
> >>
> >> What the heck do you think we're trying to do?
> >
> > Discuss advocacy and popularity at the expense of building cool tools
> > with Perl.
>
> You're bifurcating, again.
And you're going ad hominem, again.
Adam's point is a legitimate one.
Advocacy *doesn't* work well.
A lot of people don't like being preached at or sold to. I certainly
don't like it, even though this is something I'd be receptive to.
On the other hand, people CAN be impressed by effective solutions to
tangible problems, and if you can do this in a visible way using Perl,
then people that are interested in such things will get the hint and
take a look at Perl for themselves.
The Perl Success Stories site is great for this sort of thing:
<http://perl.oreilly.com/news/success_stories.html>
But beyond keeping sites like that prominent, there's not really a lot
that can be done, pragmatically speaking, that seems likely to help.
This isn't to say that advocacy is worthless. Obviously, some people
think it's a big deal, and want to spend time on it. Fine. That's okay.
Good luck with that. But you have to choose your fights wisely, and to
me this doesn't look like an effective one, compared to how effective a
more JFDI ("just fucking do it") approach that sets about solving
interesting problems -- like, say, finishing Perl 6, to pick something
at random -- and using the success of that to reflect well on Perl.
Adam's points are reasonable.
I don't see why he's being attacked for voicing them.
--
Chris Devers, who figures that if people want to keep mutilating the
dead horse, he might as well get in a kick of his own, even though THE
NAZIS ALSO KICKED DEAD HORSES AND ADVOCATED FOR MORE PERL USE, TOO.
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