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.

<scene>
Randal: You shouldn't use eval needlessly. It can be dangerous.
So called Grouped expert: Who are YOU to advise me?
Somebody else: The author of "Learning Perl"
So called Grouped expert: Oh.
</scene>

;-)


holli, /regexed monk/

Actually, that's exactly what I don't do. If I ever use my status or history to try to sway the argument, I've already lost.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

Have you considered Why Perl Advocacy Is A Bad Idea (see also The Rules of Perl Club)? :-)

Of course. I think you miss my point. My point isn't to go find some Java forum and troll for 30 pages about why Perl beats Java (Obviously it does! =] ). That won't do anything useful, which is what the linked article seems to talk about. My desire is to help people writing bad perl code to write good perl code.

When I started my current position as an AIX administrator - I was in awe at the amount of Perl code we had running on our systems - I though "Cool", I can do this. After rewriting several hundred scripts - its no longer cool. I tried explaining to people I work with why

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
[download]

is a good idea - they still don't get it, they say their code works fine. Case in point - we have a cgi script that allows us to control our printers - I took one look at it, added

#!/usr/bin/perl -T
use strict;
use warnings;
use diagnostics;
[download]

Needless to say, the script(s) failed miserably, I rewrote the several thousand line long flub and they complain, because it doesn't look the same, and if I leave who will maintain my code? I find myself writing a lot of what I consider decent code to conform to the poor performance and bad interface standards that the people I work with are used to - In turn I penned the node perl programming for a living.

I thank the Gods everyday for perlmonks, it provides some clarity to the fog.


Ted
--
"That which we persist in doing becomes easier, not that the task itself has become easier, but that our ability to perform it has improved."
  --Ralph Waldo Emerson

I see a couple of problems with this article (Why Perl Advocacy Is A Bad Idea). First, it's pretty arrogant. I like the idea that I'm among a group of smart people, and that makes me smart, too. Of course, just associating with smart people won't make me smart. I still have to do the work.

The other objection I have is simply that you're never going to be able to hide from the so-called dumb people, the huddled masses, the unwashed millions, hoi polloi, proletariat, peasants, whatever you call them. They're out there, in a location near you, and you'll never get away from them.

IMNSHO, it's useless to try to preserve our sacred Perl from the minions of the Unclean. It is much better to work to educate those who want to play or work with Perl, to help them become better coders. I think Merlyn's got the right idea - get out there and try to correct the errors. It may prove to be Perl before swine, but it may also help to rehabilitate Perl's undeserved reputation.

I think you may have entirely misread davorg's article (originally given as a talk during 2001,) taking it literally rather than humourously as I know the author intended. Or maybe I'm missing something in your comments. What I do know is that davorg has more than most done what the OP is suggesting, taking good Perl to the outer fringes of the cargo cult, blind leading the blind world in forums that people here would baulk at.

davorg's talk was in a long tradition, perhaps epitomised by Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal

Update: I had forgotten Dave's other talk he gave that year, which balances things nicely.

/J\

"you're never going to be able to hide from the so-called dumb people,"

very ironic!!!

"educate those who want to play or work with Perl, to help them become better coders"

Some visitors to the Perl world are better coder than you, I don't know whether you should educate them, or they should educate you.

Despite my (humorously intended) first reply, I think that you are quite right and that Perl Ambassadorship is indeed a worthy objective. I suspect that many of us are so comfortable in the nurturing and knowledgable envioronment of the Monastery that we seldom venture out to visit some of the wilder congregations of Perl users.

For those monks who feel inclined to do a little outreach, I'd suggest that taking along a bible (full of links back to the Monastery) will not only provide enlightenment to the more impoverished members of the Perl community, but may lead some of them back here to the benefit of us all.

IMNSHO, one of Perl's greatest strengths is the ability to write useful code without having to know the whole language. It's that powerful. Another is that there is a whole lot of substance to the language, if you want to dive into deep waters.

Unfortunately, the simplicity of Perl means that some people will be satisfied with a low level of understanding, creating badly written code and so on. The criticism against Perl is misguided. There are bad scripts out there, not because Perl causes people to write bad programs, but because Perl doesn't force people to adhere to one way of doing things. Perl allows us to write bad code, and some of us do. It's an issue of freedom. We don't always use our freedom wisely, but that's not a fault of the concept of freedom itself.

Personally, I think you have a good point about ambassadorship. Bad coders are going to be cranking out garbage no matter what we do. We can stand by helplessly, or we can create and publicize good code, useful and well-written scripts and modules.

There is a well-worn saying that I like: "All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing". So - do we let the world go to hell, or do we try to do something to balance the "evil"?

Continuing on the lines of my personal history, I believed that http://www.perl.com was the central reference for Perl for many years, and never encountered PM there. Also in http://www.perl.org the link to the real Perl community can be easily overlooked: it comes after the mongers' website.

Probably the name itself fooled me for a long time: if I search on http://www.google.com for "perl community", PM pops in the first result page (which is good), but the name is not so attractive (i.e. it doesn't make me think that it's the most advanced Perl community, and this is bad) and the description could be better (not to say that it - ehr - sucks):

Contains tutorials, discussion forums, Perl poetry, obfuscated code, and a large code repository.

This is completely bad IMHO. Perl Monks is much, much more than this. Moreover, as a novice I'm not usually interested in obfuscated code, and seeing about Perl poetry makes me think that I'd be losing my (prosaic) time.

I know that PM is relatively young (only 5 years old AFAIK), so many other places grew up. But I think that a novice to Perl should be able to quickly find PM as the reference site for Perl, avoiding to drown in obscure and wrong-suggesting forums.

This does not mean that there shouldn't be other communities: I want to say that the novices should be able to know that here it's a place where info and answers are excellent, and they should be able to know it as soon as possible.

To summarise in one word, Perl should be better advertised in the places where one would naturally look for info about Perl: the websites above.

I used to worry about the popularity of Perl, but all I know is that it works perfectly for my web-based applications, as it does for the huge enterprise sites like Amazon. So, I put my worries about it's popularity in the same category as PM XP--interesting to monitor, but nothing to get worked up about.

I *am* glad I found the Monastery--I've not only learned the fundamentals and methods, but how to write safe and efficient Perl.

I don't care much. The people who don't like the language mostly feel that way because of it's sometimes slightly eccentric syntax. If they feel that, they're never going to go for it, whatever. Let them do their own thing.

Conversely, people who are prepared to put the effort in to get some mastery of the language reap their rewards, So be it. It DOES take some effort to learn, it isn't the easiest to pick up straight away just because it was designed by someone trying to make a very powerful tool, rather than ride on the success of existing syntax (as java did on C(PP)). I can see good and bad in both schools of thought, and I know which is for me.

Look to me like Perl is doing just fine ...