Certainly true, but then, Perl seems to attract people for much more than purely technical merits. Perl people tend to develop a stronger attachement to Perl than others to their language of choice, and none of these communities have an archive that has worked out so well as CPAN. Perl is about the social merits as much as about the technical ones. In such an atmosphere, it's obvious that peope will earn respect on the basis of other than just technical capacity.

Is that bad? From a technical standpoint, maybe. Personally, I find it makes things more fun. And I'm with Linus on this one - the point of life is having fun.

Of course there's dangers to this approach. But so are there to a pure meritocracy. No community can ever be healthy if it doesn't continuously question itself - and that's something every community fails to do sufficiently (though some more so than others). Perl's is not alone in that regard.

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re^5: GoodBye :-) by Aristotle
in thread GoodBye :-) by mt2k

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