Over the weekend, the February 2002 hard copy edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal was delivered to my house. I had not heard about this conference until I read the article that larsen pointed to in his post. I was really glad to see that a small thread had already been started about the conference when I searched for it.

Although I suspect that many of the participants were more than a little biased against Perl and also against fully implemented programming languages that can thrive in the real world, I think that the Perl development community needs to understand and engage academics so that our work receives the respect that it deserves.

I sincerely wish that more attention is paid to issues like this (our relationship to other development and research communities) in discussions here on PerlMonks. It's just that I'm not exactly sure what to do in order to encourage and/or facilitate this.

FWIW, I was really impressed with the Simon Cozens' goodwill and patience in his explanation of the Lightweight Languages Workshop, particularly since it sounds like he and Dan Sugalski were besieged because some of the other attendees didn't appreciate Perl. We were very fortunate to have people like them representing us.

Dave Aiello
Chatham Township Data Corporation