To an extent, yes.

You can look at movie stars, singers, and related crud and say "See! they do it to!" You'd almost have a point, except their industry, and the IT industry (more specifically open programming) are extremely different. Their industry is looking good and being articulate, not creating intelligent solutions and contributing to a community. There are a good number of these people who do contribute, but they're rarely recognized for it.

As for arenas similar to Perl, none I've seen come close. Guido and Matz aren't viewed in nearly the same light as Larry Wall or his underlings. You also end up with people idolized for (almost) totally useless things like obfuscation. What benefit does this possibly have? Please don't say "Learning more about the language" because there are many far, far better ways to do this. The only reason I can think of is it's some more acceptable form of "1337sp34k" designed to scare off the newbies and convince them you're better. This type of behavior should be limited to web design scum and shouldn't infect a (potentially) real language like Perl. Stick with a true meritocracy, don't bother with idolizing programming popstars.

I think I just forgot the point to this rant, but it's probably in there somewhere.

In reply to Re: Re^3: GoodBye :-) by Anonymous Monk
in thread GoodBye :-) by mt2k

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