Beloved Brothers and Sisters in Perl.

I understand that Perl Monks is a monastery and that we all regularly meditate, fast and pray to the great Perl god through his divine representative here on Earth, the prophet Larry, may his name be for ever hallowed. We dine off olive stones and we desk-check our code before typing it onto punch cards.

I recently heard about a new religion that is doing the rounds with young people (hippies I think they are called) they have these things called Smartphones (a bit like a portable 3270 vdu), and they use a different monastery to us, called Facebook. It sounded threatening, so I looked to see what our Great Competitor is doing vatican.com.

Imagine my surprise when I saw they had a FacebookLike button on it. Call me old-fashioned maybe, but it seemed oddly sacrilegious to my way of thinking. And even something called the "g+", it's either a new compiler or it's that thing that Brother Masters and Sister Johnson were describing in 1957. I feared the worst.

So there seems to be this thing out there called "Social Media". If the Great Competitor is using it, may be we should reconsider our position, or maybe the Trappists have got it right. Maybe we should all take a vow of silence. Only to be broken with our morning chant of: use strict; use warnings; print @_;

Brother and Sisters I earnestly ask for your views on this difficult matter.

Yours in faith,

Brother Steve

PS GUYS, SOCIAL MEDIA. IT'S OUT THERE. WADDA WE GONNA DO ABOUT IT?!