Here is different.. you know better than me how our numbers are going down but we still have a nice, small core of amazingly competent monks and nuns (plus some rank of amateurs like me).

More: with less partecipants in respect to the golden age probably the ratio geek/visitors even raised. The overall quality of our beloved monastery is very high, but, in regard to get help here, there is an almost untold story: The Story of the Bored Hacker.

We all know the perl job market suffered a big contraction in last decades; we read here and there about companies deciding to migrate even large codebases to something else.. poor fashion victim managers.

Also we must consider that the Time flows inesorably and, sadly, many of us got fired or are unemployed for other reasons, digested and and spat by the Job Market Machine, or simply they reached the age when you can retire from the market with the hope to survive with what you spared (in way or other) during 35+ years of tears and blood.

A free minded hacker crossing Perl during their carrer generally fall in love with it because of perl sense of freedom, expressivity, power, available modules, stability, availability and a notable community of users. I dont mean it is automatic, but I saw many of them during last decades of my perl amaetur experience.

So, as the Average Retired Man waits for the next week sudoku issue, The Bored Hacker lurks here, famelic as a shark, eager of the next perl problem to train their brain in a new, fascinating, unexpected way.

Questions here are evidently decreasing and sometimes they are also very poor ones, but if it appears a nice, interesting question with or without some effort by the wisdom seeker, or even blatantly homework, then as a group of sharks with food frenzy, we love to solve it, dissect it, explore it, argue on it.

So to get help here you just need to be kind, to expose a problem with the necessary background, and cast a shining lure to The Bored Hacker ..et voilą you'll get a regex solution from the South of US (worth to study for days ;), a complete solution with tests from Terra Australis, the full specification of the problem from the center of the Old Continent, the Module Author explaining how to use, adding more tests and even thanking you, and a fistfull of different approaches from all over the world. The unaware Wisdom Seeker sometimes get astonished by the deepness of the support they received.

All win.

The Bored Hacker is happy (..til the next question)!

L*