I think Perl is a little like chess...it's easy to learn the basics, but it takes time to become a master.

Since most people are satisfied with "good enough," it's not surprising there are a lot of poor Perl programmers. However, I think there are a lot of poor programmers in every language.

It's more obvious with Perl, because Perl makes the simple stuff easy and the hard stuff doable...it also makes it very easy to bark up the wrong tree.

If you're not comfortable with that, take a look at what people outside the Perl/[Li|U]nix/O'Reilly community have to work with. Do some simple searches and look at the quality of the examples you'll find. Granted, there are notable exceptions, but those are few and far between. Sturgeon's Law applies to Perl information sites as well.

It's not a problem with Perl; it's with ourselves. If we are dissatisfied with certain assessments of our community, dislike certain Perl script archives, or decry the lack of attention given to the most basic security measures, good programming practises, and so on, then would it not be wise to do better? To create and post that which we would rather see? To truly lead by example?

I don't think we'll help all the poor programmers, but we can help the ones that want to be better, the ones that can become better--but only if we become part of the solution.

To be fair, I'm fully aware that some are trying to solve the problem:

• davorg's efforts to rewrite MW's cr@p,
• your efforts to present a good CGI tutorial,
• KM's (and BM's) efforts to write a good example book,
• Dominus's untiring efforts,
• tilly's continued efforts,
• and so on.

I applaud these and encourage them. I think the Monastery and the Perl Community at large would benefit if we'd focus less on what's wrong with whatever and focus more on making sure that we're all doing what's right.

--f

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