As the author of more than one OT post, I have given this some thought and had some discussion with others about it. What it seems to come down to is that Perlmonks has grown into a community and a community must naturally have a broad definition of what it is (or at least a bit of tolerance). That's not to say that we should be encouraging "what's wrong with my Java program" type posts, but rather that we should admit that there is a desire by some to discuss things only peripherally related to Perl.

Mind you, I typically don't post things that are, in my opinion, too far outside the realm of what we do -- I use my http://use.perl.org journal for that. Instead, from time to time I have thoughts that I think may be of interest to others here and I post them. I would actually not mind seeing more of that, but I have some doubts about the best way to pull it off. OT sections have been repeatedly proposed with varying ideas of how they should be restricted -- minimum monk level to post, time limit on them, no commercial solicitations, etc -- but until such time that enough monks truly decide they want something like that and the developers implement it, it simply won't happen.

On the other hand, I'm not sure I want it to happen. What we have now seems to work fairly well, though I confess that may be easier for me to say than others.

Cheers,
Ovid

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