This was sparked by another posters comments. I thought it might be interesting to read what other Perlers think of what is happening community wise. Since I came into the Perl community for what Perl offered (and I believe still does) rather recently, I would like to know your thoughts on the subject.
Not that I'm aware of...
Alias on 2006-06-04T05:02:03
I'm not sure it's atrophying so much as just not exploding.
I see new people arriving at most of the places I know of fairly regularly.
That people come and people go is the natural order of communities, I don't see it should be any different with Perl.
The other thing to note is that Perl has certainly moved to something more like a business language. There's a lot of people out there using Perl for work that aren't necesarily going to appear in communities.
Then there's the fact the the community specialises so much. Just look at the per-project channels on irc.perl.org. Most of them are quite or even VERY active, just not highly visible if you aren't looking for them.
Re:Not that I'm aware of...
brian_d_foy on 2006-06-05T04:48:56
I just saw this thread as I posted my analysis of the folly of percentages, that some people place a lot of value in. "Not exploding" is a good way to say it. :)
From traveling the world teacihng Perl, I figure that only a tiny portion of the number of people who use Perl ever show up in "the Perl community", have a personal web page, or anything that we might count.
I don't really care how big the Perl community is, as long as it is Big Enough. :)
It looks ok to me
TeeJay on 2006-06-04T18:16:15
I'm in a rural part of the UK and I managed to organise a two perl monger meetings in the space of a coupel of months with a pretty good turn out of about a dozen at each - many of those at both were people new to perl.
It doesn't have the hubris of the dot-com boom or the hype of Rails, but I'm pretty feeling pretty secure in my preferred choice of language. In fact there are a lot of people crying out for perl developers in the UK. I'm looking for a new perl contractor to work with my main client because my mate was headhunted after just a few months on the project.
I think a lot of the froth that you get around new and exciting stuff has died down because basicly many perl developers are just using perl to get their jobs done, and have been too busy working on real business solutions to play around with 'cool stuff'.
Obviously there is a lot of cool new stuff about, but I think it's the tip of a quietly successful iceberg that's mostly unseen and unappreciated but holding the internet and much financial and ecommerce together.
Re:It looks ok to me
TeeJay on 2006-06-04T18:17:58
I hasten to add that we have a LUG and a Perl Mongers in devon and cornwall but I have no idea where the nearest Microsoft/Oracle/Java/Python/PHP user group is - probably London.
I would guess we have at least another perl monger group between me and the nearest user group other than Linux.
