(sigh)

One Sunday afternoon does not a sample make. You can downvote Cop all you like (and I wish people would stop doing that, it's pointless, and merely pollutes $NORM), but (s)he does have a point. Perl is in decline, at least if you care to analyse some more meaningful statistics from the Perlmonks website itself.

Here are some statistics upon which to meditate: the number of top-level nodes created each year (where a top-level node is a SoPW, CUFP, Meditation etc.) I've drawn a bar graph as well, to make the trend more obvious.

So the site is clearly in decline. To state the contrary is to confuse desire with reality. The question to ask, though, is how well can this be mapped to the overall health of the Perl community? I think the answer is... poorly. There are small but vibrant discussions over at use.perl, there's loads of traffic on all the Perl mailing lists I read, and there's a considerable volume of new CPAN releases each and every day.

That said, I've been coming here for seven years and it's still my favourite site on the web. I've become a much better Perl programmer, and a programmer in general, as a result.