First, I love PerlMonks. It's the very first community I really felt a kinship with on the internet back in the day when CGI was king and Perl was it's handmaiden. And PerlMonks is still a great resource for connecting with people who really love and appreciate Perl and, more importantly, love sharing their love for the craft of Perl programming.

But I have to say that I think it's success has come despite the aging, creaking interface that is PerlMonks. Now, I don't want to be too harsh. In fact, I suppose part of PerlMonk's charm now is its aging, creaking interface. And I'm more than happy to put up with it and forego StackOverflow for certain questions simply because this is much more of community and it's less transactional than StackOverflow. There's lots of really cool people here and if you are going to be a proper Perl programmer and truly understand the culture of Perl, being on PerlMonks is kind of a requirement.

I also want to be careful not to crap on the people who operate this site. It still works good enough and I am grateful for the people who operate it. So thank you!

That said, every time I come to PerlMonks I have to wonder why the PerlMonks interface is frozen in 2001. Is it lack of resources? Lack of manpower? Lack of interest? Was the original PerlMonks code written in such a way to make it nearly impossible to upgrade the interface? A little bit of all of the above?

And from a marketing perspective, does sticking with an older interface contribute negatively to the perception that Perl is programming language of the past? I'm willing to bet a lot of potential new Perl programmers, who don't yet have the wisdom of the more seasoned folks around here, abandoned this site because of the interface. It's a shame because PerlMonks is just a totally awesome place.

And look, I'm not calling for a total overhaul. But even minor improvements would be great like not having to type HTML into the textareas or having to refresh the page to see new chatbox messages.

Yes, PerlMonks is good enough, but I keep wondering what holds it back from becoming just a little bit better. Any insight to satisfy my curiousity is appreciated so I can quit wondering.

$PM = "Perl Monk's";
$MCF = "Most Clueless Friar Abbot Bishop Pontiff Deacon Curate";
$nysus = $PM . ' ' . $MCF;
Click here if you love Perl Monks

In reply to So what's the deal with PerlMonks not changing in like 16 years? by nysus

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.