“I think programming language advocacy is a big problem, not
just for the Perl community, but for the larger programming
community….”
“I think this same thing has happened to programming language
discussions. Advocacy has become so natural to us that we forget
there is any other way to discuss programming languages. Even if we
don’t forget, other people can’t understand us because they hear
advocacy whether we want them to or not….”
“I got mail a couple of days ago from Jasmine Merced-Ownby, who
runs the Perl Archive web site. Part of the site had been
implemented with PHP, and she was getting letters from people who
were concerned that this ‘made Perl look bad’.”
“I guess an implicit admission that Perl might not be the very
best tool for every possible job could be construed as making Perl
look bad, but it seems like an awfully peculiar response, unless
you imagine Perl and PHP engaged in a war from which there can be
only one victor, and unless you think that if PHP is good for
something, anything at all, then Perl must be bad.”