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in reply to Professional Monks

I have long thought an online service was needed where developers can turn to for peer review on more than just code. In my own experiences, non-programming issues have more to do with a succesful career than programing issues. Situations at work and home can drastically impact performance and quality of work. More often than not, all any individual can turn to for these issues is the company's human resources. Kind of like growing your own hanging tree.

We have seen many issues voiced here from people who were blind-sided by a lack of understanding of their options, or were just to pressured to be able to think clearly. Many of us do not have close friends or relatives who understand the peculiarities of IP law, IT politics and other such subjects.

This is a Perl site. Do we limit it to include only programming Perl? Or do we allow that to include workplace issues for Perl developers, which just happen to be shared by most developers?

To me, if this site is to be more useful to the Perl developers' community at large, then including the other topics is incredibly valuable. The number of times in my career I have made decisions based upon bad information or misunderstandings is scary. Most of us have. I assume there are some who have not (though I do not know them).

By recording these "discussions", we give others a chance to learn from these misfortunes, and hopefully lead a better more productive career. Better performing Perl programmers is a good thing for all of us.

In addition, this would be a valuable resource that would draw other developers to the Perl community. At first, they would not nescesarily be here for the Perl, but it would expose them to it. Would that not be a good thing?

Digiryde

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Re: Professional Monks
by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Aug 19, 2002 at 09:53 UTC
    In addition, this would be a valuable resource that would draw other developers to the Perl community. At first, they would not nescesarily be here for the Perl, but it would expose them to it. Would that not be a good thing?
    Eh, no. Just watch slashdot whenever someone happens to mention something about Perl. Many programmers who mainly use language X will balk when being exposed to language Y. Just look at the typical reaction of Perl programmers when languages like Java or Python are mentioned. You will get a lot of "rooting for my language/degrading other languages" discussions if your intention is to draw crowds from other languages to perlmonks.org.

    Not that I worry that it will happen a lot, but that's because I don't think you will get many non-Perl developers to a corner of perlmonks. I wouldn't go to Java or C++ websites to discuss general developer issues, though I might go to neutral grounds.

    Abigail

[reply]

      I agree (mostly). I always run into Trolls. I think we have a good way of dealing with them here. I am not worried about getting a large influx of "other-language" developers here for the very reason you state. But, I know when I was crossing over to Perl, I would have loved a site like this.

      I did not start using Perl because Perl was cool. I started using Perl as a systems admin when I kept finding good tools written in Perl. Until then I thought Perl was a hobby language (1993) with not much value (as did most of the people I worked with). After someone (Ingo C.) showed us some of his tools in Perl, and how easy they were to create in Perl, we started converting.

      People who are great programmers learn new tools. It is part of the job in many ways. I think a section on this site concerning professionalism would be good exposure for Perl programmers to other language users as well as just good for Perl programmers.

      Yeah, the children will come. You are correct. Nodereaper will reap. But, I do not think many children will show up to a section on professionalism. They are not interested in it.

      Digiryde
[reply]

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