I did not mean to suggest that anyone told me to get out of the perl community. I meant to say that....

I was with the Perl community since CGI was born and I have been through many things with many Perl sub-communities.

Now this is no fault of you or PerlMonks, but "in general", I feel that the Perl community fell into a place that I no longer wanted to be a part of right around the time Java, PHP, and ASP really started getting strong.

It also corresponds to when Tom C wrote 'Perl Cookbook' which is technically a fantastic book.

Something happened to the community then.

IMHO, it got really snobby and critial. It forgot all about TMTOWTDI. Suddenly, anyone coding Perl 4 was not only a loser but...dangerous.

People like Monk Dave, called pioneers like Matt Wright and me, "dangerous" and "ignorant", when in fact we were brave enough to stick our necks out and not only build functional tools at the dawn of the revolution when we had NO refernece models, but document them well enough that many people could use them. We inspired a generation of programmers,some of whom like Stas Bekman of the mod_perlcommunity, became the gurus of today.

In both cases, we did this for years without being paid - out of our love for the community.

Granted, Matt did not keep up with security issues as fast as we might have hoped, but he had a life to lead too...you know....he had to pay rent.

If only the nms site, which is a fantastic idea, had happened without name calling. If only people had used our open CVS tree which was on sourceforge for many moons.

But that did not happen. Instead....smear campaign.

For my case, our tools were updated as quickly as possible. We did have security holes, but so does everyone. We did have bugs in our code...but so does everyone. What matters is that we responded quickly when issues were presented. We were one of the first sites to move to taintmode, for example. We fixed the cross site scripting hole 10 hours after it was announced.

....

I think that maybe this culture change was a defensive reaction to competition and possibly it was a reflection of a new breed of gurus (who cared more about technology) taking over from the first generation (who cared more about people).

Whatever the case, for me, Perl became a much unfriendlier and less tolerant place to be, and it eventually "pushed me out".

I don't want you to feel that I have anything against Perl Monks or you. Actually, you guys stopped "me" from flaming which is something I rarely do, cause if you got to know me you would see that I almost never participate in a flame war.

It is just that I am really burned on the Perl community at large and at the moment, I don't want to risk investing my energies again into something that I have lost faith and trust in.