Perl is dead

[Greg McCarroll]

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.

G.