That may be true, or it may not be true. The point is that just because the huge corporations can't make money off of it, dosn't mean its dead. It's still a very useful tool to the millions of us who just need to open a can. I don't give a sh*t about keeping a fleet of aircraft flying, I just want to open my can of beans.

Large corporations (and smaller ones) can and do make money from Perl all the time, and have been for years. It's not dead, no matter how many times demoralising trolls rock up to cry about it.

I have unreaped this node, for reasons which I would hope would be obvious to everyone. "Not helpful" is not a sufficient reason for reaping, even when combined with "by Anonymous Monk".

Moderators, please review your guidelines (bir, iki). Thank you.

Because it was inaccurate, profane, fallacy ridden, cryptoantiperl6 garbage from a nobody? That’s why I --ed and voted to reap. If it had someone’s name on it, I wouldn’t have done so. I would have replied on the points I mention though.

It was I who posted that reply, and not because I'm an anonymous coward, but because I did not have my perlmonks login with me on that laptop.

I'm not going to insist to have my post un-reaped, although I stand by my opinion. However, I do see several problems with its deletion.

First, I object to the reason that it was "unhelpful and made by an anon coward" for two reasons: I don't think that it's unhelpful (it may be harsh, but I think it was necessary), and I don't see why it matters that it was posted (nominally) by Anonymous. Perlmonks is (used to be? only I imagined it to be?) one of the relatively few places on the Internet where opinions were evaluated based on their merit alone, decoupled from the person who expressed them. If posts can now be unilaterally, arbitrarily deleted, just because someone feels that its contents don't agree with them and because it was posted by an anonymous user, that leads straight away into the kind of echo chamber where meaningful discussion is no longer possible or even desirable.

Second, I probably don't matter. But if you treat better programmers than me like this, people who are willing and able to contribute code and effort to reduce the gap that exists between Perl and the rest of the world (and I maintain that such a gap exists), abusing and silencing them, then they are just going to shrug and leave, never to look back. Do we want that? To chase away the best of us, just because they disagree?

Right now, we, the Perl community are like those lungfish that first crawled out from the sea. We've found nice, warm puddles near the shores for ourselves, and that was a great achievement for its time. But since then we've stayed in those puddles, and we stubbornly keep telling ourselves that it's fine this way, all the while others have moved on, diversified and colonized the rest of the continent. And we refuse to even look up and acknowledge that. I find that sad.

I might have used stronger words than strictly necessary - I wrote that post in a break of a conference where I was forced to learn about a whole new array of concepts, tools and processes I had no idea about. I still consider myself a Perl programmer, that's what I do professionally, but stepping outside my usual circles, being forced to look at this whole wide world I was never even aware of, made me think, made me re-evaluate the value of my skills, my professional future. And then I checked Perlmonks, and I saw the same old, tired "Perl is not dead" argument. I replied, and I'm not sorry.

Finally, you write that my post was "inaccurate, profane, fallacy ridden, cryptoantiperl6". I think none of this is true. Please provide specific examples for each accusation.