(This was to be a response to another post, but decided to start a new thread.)

I'm a language/buzzword addict, always looking for reasons to learn a new language, or more accurately, afraid of missing something great in a new language: php, python, ruby, etc...

This by itself is fine, and I'll continue to explore new languages. But I recently realized that there is no panacea in any language: if we're learning a language in the hope that it will somehow just solves our problems, we'll be disappointed. Beyond the simplest examples, I always find myself facing almost exactly the same problems in any language. And in those circumstances, I always resort to google, mailing lists and code repositories, in other words, asking the community for help.

This led me to the conclusion: ultimately it's the community that makes a language useful, it's the ticking of time that allows both the language and the community to mature. In this regard, perl and CPAN have a good head start. For the same reason, other languages will likely catch up if there is enough following. How many times have we complained about a shortcoming in a language and only to be told that it's resolved two versions ago? the same applies to perl itself.

In reply to It's the community, stupid. by johnnywang

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.