We all know Perl often has a bad reputation which, for the most part, is undeserved. However, for most of the past couple of years, all of the Perl I've seen has been either written here at the monastery or on CPAN, both of which tend to have high standards, so I've been a little confused as to why exactly Perl gets such a bad rep. Recently I was pondering this issue and did a google search for "Perl Forums". No longer was I in doubt as to why perl had a bad reputation. I found many, many examples of hideous code and even more hideous help.

Here at the monastery, we all, in general, know what the right thing to do is. We follow good coding standards and styles. Our code conforms to strict and warnings where it is helpful. Our code is just plain nice, however, at least in my case, this tends to produce a case of blindess, where I assume all code is equally as nice as the code I see here on a daily basis. It's not. I would even venture to guess that far more Perl is written by people outside the monastery than inside. And lots of these people learn from poor sources, then go on to teach other people their poorly learned wisdom, producing a self-perpetuating cycle that tends to reflect, however wrongly, on Perl itself.

I view this as a bad thing, which brings me to the point of this post. I fairly often see posts by people asking what exactly they can do to help the community who has helped them so much, but are unwilling to dive in to some of the more complicated Perl tasks (such as CPAN modules and so forth). So here's my answer, along with a plea to anyone in general interested in helping the perl community.

Go forth and spread the wisdom! In specific, use some means to find a new perl forum and spend time helping the people there learn the Right Way to code perl. Advocate strict and warnings. Advocate sane coding practices. Do what you can to improve their knowledge, and there by improve Perl's reputation.

Perhaps we could even, dare I say, eradicate Perl's reputation for bad code. I admit this is some what of a lofty goal, but any effort is better than no effort.

As for specific Perl Forums, I'm afraid I can't name any specific ones, but a google search yields a few pages that should get you started.

In reply to Perl forum ambassadors? by BUU

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