Lets imagine you have an important question about a ruby library that's giving you no ends of problems. Finally you are posting your first question on a site dedicated to ruby. Imagine further the first answer you receive would begin with

"First of all, it is Ruby, not ruby. Only the interpreter is called ruby. ..."

Now what would be your first impression of the s/r/R/uby community after that (if you were susceptible to generalizations) ?

a) Very thorough people. And so very right. How could I miss such a fundamental property of the language

b) Hey, did they swallow a stick or what?

I believe that newbies on perlmonks who get corrected about PERL tend to think of sticks as well

If we want to attract new people to perl, there sure are more effective measures (more sensational hype, colors and animations on the website, cool language features to name a few), but one good way to push away interested newcomers is to correct them sternly about a triviality

Is perl vs. PERL vs. Perl a triviality? I would say so (counter arguments welcome), but even if you are of a different opinion you should think about how it looks to new posters. Spelling correction is after all the last line of defense in any flame war and it usually looks silly to everyone else

But wait, I have solutions:

1) "Don't mention the war" Ignore it. Anyone staying longer with perl will adopt the right spelling by observation and mimicry fast enough

2) "I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it" Put in lots of 'perl' in your answer. Instead of "Use split to extract the data" say "perl has the split function to extract the data". He won't have a chance against his subconsciousness

3) "Yes, you did. You invaded Poland" If you really really must mention it, let it look like an afterthought, hide it in some subordinate clause or in parens. "perl allows you to do that with split (nobody writes PERL by the way)".

PS: Citations from "Fawlty Towers"

PPS: Yes, this node has the same fault it critizises, i.e. making a big case out of a triviality. Let's call it self referential

In reply to To Perl or not to PERL. by jethro

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