Ovid had its winter depression (anyone has this sometimes) and many responses, shortly followed by the sekrit which might bring hope to those who depend on outer mood (im not big mouthing-most of time i dont currently i do :)).
I know something about the Index. Once I posted some improvements to the Perl counter and had this way a discussion with mr jansen because he also asked me few things, any professional Perl programmer should be educated about. Yes he has a strong personal opinion that Perl is dying based on some observations he had in his close neighborhood. thats understandable but not too smart.
BTW i know what this "perl is dying" is all about i think i understand this very well. We have this discussion on every german perl workshop since i attend. but my main point does focus not on the things paul, ovid and others understand very well but on the things they don't undestand. There were some points Paul can easily (technically) proven wrong (there are tools like Perl::Critic to handle large Perl projects, and some points more), in some points he is right but thats things most of you know. the interesting lies somewhere else.
Python and Ruby are today where they are, because people in their community worked for it some times in underdog position. They knew they had something very valuable that needed some extra polish. We have also lot of valuable stuff plus lots of expertise how to get things done.
please don't get me wrong i'm not talking about homeless, headless merketing spin. Java was more than a merketing coup. there were a lot of UNIX veterans at the sun campus that learned many lessons the hard way. If you don't believe this, check google video.
My main point is to take it with joy. In some areas we seem to lay a bit behind. Great. Nobody expect the spanish inquisition. And nearly Nobody expect that perl will be cool again (seting the state of the tools-so help us with Kephra :) ). Maybe except a few of us and Tim O'Reilly who is old enough to remember that this mood was there at the end of Perl 4 before.
