In my opinion, that article was probably not very influential. I remember reading it at the time and thinking "What on earth is he talking about?" At most, it might demonstrate some things that were going on in one particular corner of the perl community. At the time, the Perl 5 Porters list and the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup were both fairly contentious. This probably had more to do with a few key individuals than anything else. If you look at the list back then, you'll see some pretty serious wars going on.

People who are very involved in p5p sometimes forget how small it is. The vast majority of perl programmers don't even read it, let alone ask beginner questions there. And in 2001, newsgroups were already mostly dead for newbies. I can't speak to the influence on PerlMonks, since I wasn't here then, but I can tell you that I asked dumb (although not FAQ or un-researched) questions in various places and never got yelled at for it, and this was well before Casey's article.

In reply to Re: Some Perl history for beginners (by a beginner) by perrin
in thread Some Perl history for beginners (by a beginner) by McMahon

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