what happens to Perl as the older programmers fade away?

The question is less what happens to Perl and more what happens to the Perl community. Being opensource whatever happens to Perl will be the same as what happens to other opensource projects as the "whats in it for me" attitude takes over. The projects may begin to stagnate as no-one sees any value in contributing to something when there is little direct value to them. We will see local patches to fix some percieved problem that are then never disseminated back to the opensource project. The community is beginning to shrivel up, places like this or stackoverflow will see lots of questions and few answers. But then people will again begin to see the value in being one that gives an answer or one that posts a patch. The value is to their SELF worth, not their external worth.

You see this cycle happen to the music/bands community all the time. The beginning of the cycle is the "free beer" phase, you see a lot of bands willing to play for free beer, because having other people listen to them gives them a warm fuzzy feeling, then after a while it becomes more and more of a pain to haul your gear around setting it up and taking it down, and that pain overwhelms the warm fuzzy feeling. Now they want BIG BUCKS to play a gig. And for a while they probably get it, till the next crop of free beer bands comes along.

For some unknown to me reasons these cycles do seem to happen happen in bunches.There are a lot of free beer bands at the same time, and the music community grows, then they all phase into pay me bands about the same time. I would expect to see a steady stream of free beer bands entering all the time. It may be because when there are too many bands at once the crowd gets so split up that the warm fuzzy feeling is much smaller because the overall crowd has been split up into too many small crowds. And so many drop out before becoming pay me bands, and it isnt until there are too few good pay me bands that you get enough of a crowd to make being a free beer band worth it to your self image.

In reply to Re: Ayn Rand vs. Stewart Brand by huck
in thread Ayn Rand vs. Stewart Brand by nysus

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