I have only been to a couple meetings of the San Diego Perl Mongers, but I jumped at
the chance to attend the meeting for another group. Particularly in the
host city of OSCON. The Portland Perl
Mongers was better attended than my local group's meetings, but I
don't know how much of that was due to being paired with OSCON. According
to a couple group members, Portland does have a vibrant Perl Mongers
community.
I found it odd that the Portland Perl Mongers meetings would be at 6:53pm,
so I had to ask about it. As it so happens, they used to schedule the
meetings for 6:30pm, but people would arrive late or complain that the
meeting time was too early. So they changed the regularly scheduled
meeting time to be seven minutes 'til seven.
Robert Spier of Perl.org fame
was present to talk about, well Perl.org. He explained what they do for
the Perl community and what they utilize to accomplish what they do. It
was an informative presentation and it's mildly surprising that Perl.org
uses a number of non-Perl technologies in their day-to-day operations.
However, I shouldn't be that surprised. A service like Perl.org should be
focused on using the right tool for the job, whether or not that tool
happens to be written in Perl. Sometimes the Perl solution is either
non-existant or not up to par—in which case it may as well be
non-existant.
