Re: It's the community, stupid.

You have hit it right on the head. Perl does offer a great deal, but what made the difference to me was the community. If I have a question (and I have plenty), I know I can come here and ask. Provided I do some work and ask something halfway intelligent, I am likely to get a bunch of reasonable, useful answers. I've never seen this with other languages. I've never found, say, a C++ community. This is one of the most important things about Perl that makes it so useful. It's the people who are using it, who are willing to help others learn it.

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Re^2: It's the community, stupid. by monarch (Priest) on Sep 13, 2005 at 00:00 UTC
Actually, on that point, I suspect that the Perl community is sufficiently small to have a common gathering point (e.g. perlmonks), and large enough to make that community a strong force. I suspect the C++ user-base, on the other hand, is a magnitude in size larger and hence has many segmented communities. Newsgroups have commonly been a community gathering point for many well-established languages, and some excellent user manuals have been written by language developers in the 80s and 90s for the likes of C and C++. There exist, nowadays, some other web site based forums although few of these are well designed - most rely heavily on graphics to "look cool" while significantly detracting from functionality - perlmonks is a very functional, almost twiki-like, site -- and this really makes this a great gathering point.	[reply]

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Re^2: It's the community, stupid.
by monarch (Priest) on Sep 13, 2005 at 00:00 UTC

I suspect the C++ user-base, on the other hand, is a magnitude in size larger and hence has many segmented communities. Newsgroups have commonly been a community gathering point for many well-established languages, and some excellent user manuals have been written by language developers in the 80s and 90s for the likes of C and C++.

There exist, nowadays, some other web site based forums although few of these are well designed - most rely heavily on graphics to "look cool" while significantly detracting from functionality - perlmonks is a very functional, almost twiki-like, site -- and this really makes this a great gathering point.

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