Certainly true, but then, Perl seems to attract people for much more than purely technical merits. Perl people tend to develop a stronger attachement to Perl than others to their language of choice, and none of these communities have an archive that has worked out so well as CPAN. Perl is about the social merits as much as about the technical ones. In such an atmosphere, it's obvious that peope will earn respect on the basis of other than just technical capacity.

Is that bad? From a technical standpoint, maybe. Personally, I find it makes things more fun. And I'm with Linus on this one - the point of life is having fun.

Of course there's dangers to this approach. But so are there to a pure meritocracy. No community can ever be healthy if it doesn't continuously question itself - and that's something every community fails to do sufficiently (though some more so than others). Perl's is not alone in that regard.

Makeshifts last the longest.

Perl people tend to develop a stronger attachement to Perl than others to their language of choice

This is an extremely dangerous thing. At first it appears great for Perl - more people attached to it, more people using it, more publicity, great. However, this leads to programmers who have only one tool and get tunnel vision. They lose objectivity and innovation is greatly reduced. You end up with people trying to do silly things that were never meant for Perl. Perl is adapted to try and make these things semi-possible, and it loses its strengths and becomes so overly broad that it is surpassed in almost every area. People keep using it only because they sort of still know how to use and it is (barely) okay for the job, but there are many better alternatives.

I should note this is not the current situation, just a future scenario based on the current path. Hopefully a major change, such as Parrot and Perl 6 will take us down a different direction. I firmly believe better integration with other languages is the solution to this problem.

No community can ever be healthy if it doesn't continuously question itself - and that's something every community fails to do sufficiently

Well said, and as one may guess from my previous post, I don't think that the Perl community is very open to constructive criticism. It seems to deal with it in a "Flame. That's not the Perl way. Ignore" type attitude. As always, there are exceptions (such as yourself judging from your reply) but those exceptions aren't an accurate representation of the masses.

I think CPAN is also an important part of the equation, it does lead to many mostly non-programmers being able to throw together solutions. This has its good and bad points. The good being greater access to programming, which helps improve a huge number of important skills. The bad being that if you're just throwing together solutions, you don't really learn that much and you risk doing something stupid. It does provide a decent gateway to programming though.

Do Perl people develop tunnel vision? As always, It Depends.

Some people certainly will.

I find that Perl exposed me to new concepts and sparked my interest in looking beyond my horizon in the first place. It opened up the world of list oriented programming; I definitely want to learn LISP and maybe other functional languages now. Its nuts-and-bolts approach to OO opened my eyes to problems, choices and design decisions in OO design I didn't even notice in more traditional OO languages before. Together with the fact that Ruby's proclaimed aim is to be the better Perl, that made me go and learn that language, making me appreciate the "blackbox", BDSM approach to OO more from a different point of view. That's whence my resurfaced interest in learning Smalltalk at some point came from. For good measure, I want to see what declarative programming a la Prolog is all about.

All that said, I will probably keep coming back to Perl. I don't think that implies tunnel vision. Many ideas that work in one language work in another too - one just needs the expertise to translate. Closures are to LISP what anonymous classes are to Java. Much the same way, many ideas can be "backported" to Perl.

In my case, Perl was a powerful catalyst for developing my senses and skills. I believe it depends on the coder more than on the language whether they will develop tunnel vision. I don't think other languages make developing tunnel vision a lot harder than Perl. They just amplify the effects of tunnel vision, where Perl at least lets you get by somehow, someway, anyway. Whether that's good or bad is again debatable; with other languages, you may find yourself having to move to something else sooner. Much in this argument is a matter of priorities.




As for the exceptions vs the masses - I believe most of the prominent figures in Perl are quite open. Tilly and Dominous are strong advocates of functional programming. Larry has taken and keeps taking from other languages (latest example - some stuff from Ruby). Those are just the most obvious examples that come to mind.

As for the mindset among the less prominent masses in the community.. you probably have a point there. I don't think there's much that can be done about this though. I just sit back and thank Larry that the community frontmen are more openminded.




The fact that CPAN lowers the barriers for people to throw together solutions - I think that's ok. Some of them will develop an interest and grow to become good programmers. Others won't, but hey, they got their job done that way, and that's probably just as much as they're interested in. If it weren't for Perl, they'd just patch something together using other tools.




That's my view on things. :)

Makeshifts last the longest.