I'm curious, back in the very early days of Perl when awk and sed were king, how was Perl advocated? Did the very first perlians hang out on all unixy newsgroups and throw elegant Perl solution at problems people were asking (and expecting to see solved otherwise)? Did it start up serendipitously? Was the trick passed on from mouth to ear until all of a sudden there was a sizeable community?
Yes, I hung out on comp.unix.questions and comp.unix.shell before comp.lang.perl got its start, and answered nearly every question with a 1-2 liner in Perl.Did the very first perlians hang out on all unixy newsgroups and throw elegant Perl solution at problems people were asking (and expecting to see solved otherwise)?
It got to the point where people would post a question, and at the end say "no perl please". I'd of course gleefully ignore that, or also post a non-Perl solution as well just to show how much longer it was.
And this was Perl 3. Nothing fancy.
Re:Yeah, it was me, alright...
oneiron on 2003-02-02T05:15:29
I noticed a most interesting name among the NO voters for comp.lang.perl (1989).
:-)
Was the reason for the NO vote a desire to continue to gleefully ignore the "no perl please" pleas from the Unix folks?Re:Yeah, it was me, alright...
merlyn on 2003-02-02T17:47:15
Heh... I didn't remember doing that until you brought it up... but it was up there because I expected the group to pass by overwhelming numbers, and wanted to stand out in the vote. And now here it is, over a decade later, and my trivial rebellion is recorded for all to see.
- Barrie
Re:Ghettoization
darobin on 2003-02-03T13:43:08
Interesting. I guess we should've done the same thing with SVG, have people hang out on Flash lists instead of jumping straight into having our own lists (even though those have several thousand subscribers).
I guess it's too late now and we'll have to turn to other forms of advocacy, such as bothering editors and the such.
