Recently, I had a conversation on IRC with a fellow London Perl Monger. He was saying that he wanted to improve his perl programming ability, but found much of the discussion on london.pm over his head, and most Perl books too easy.

I asked him if he had tried Perlmonks; he replied that he found the monks too CGI and web script centred - which surprised me.

However, looking at SoPW, there is a predominance of CGI questions and issues. I wonder whether this is a reflection of the Perl community as a whole - what percentage of Perl hackers are using the language (just) for web hosting?

I also recall the damage that has been done to the language's reputation by the likes of MSA and its descendents, and I know that many honourable monks are out there trying to fix it and spread the word (see Not Matt's Scripts).

However, there are many other topics of interest to me, am glad to see postings on the following subjects and I will probably ++ a node just on account of its subject.

• Design patterns in perl
• The future of the language: P6/Parrot, P5.xx, Rindolf, Ruby convergence
• Pure dynamic perl - a la Smalltalk
• Enterprise architectures: P2EE, Soap
• Natural language parsing
• Automated install / configuration management: CPANPLUS, PPM, cvs integration

Is it just me, or are there others out there who would like to see Perl being used in a more widespread fashion, not just by web script jockeys?

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