what happens to Perl as the older programmers fade away?

The question is less what happens to Perl and more what happens to the Perl community. Being opensource whatever happens to Perl will be the same as what happens to other opensource projects as the "whats in it for me" attitude takes over. The projects may begin to stagnate as no-one sees any value in contributing to something when there is little direct value to them. We will see local patches to fix some percieved problem that are then never disseminated back to the opensource project. The community is beginning to shrivel up, places like this or stackoverflow will see lots of questions and few answers. But then people will again begin to see the value in being one that gives an answer or one that posts a patch. The value is to their SELF worth, not their external worth.

You see this cycle happen to the music/bands community all the time. The beginning of the cycle is the "free beer" phase, you see a lot of bands willing to play for free beer, because having other people listen to them gives them a warm fuzzy feeling, then after a while it becomes more and more of a pain to haul your gear around setting it up and taking it down, and that pain overwhelms the warm fuzzy feeling. Now they want BIG BUCKS to play a gig. And for a while they probably get it, till the next crop of free beer bands comes along.

For some unknown to me reasons these cycles do seem to happen happen in bunches.There are a lot of free beer bands at the same time, and the music community grows, then they all phase into pay me bands about the same time. I would expect to see a steady stream of free beer bands entering all the time. It may be because when there are too many bands at once the crowd gets so split up that the warm fuzzy feeling is much smaller because the overall crowd has been split up into too many small crowds. And so many drop out before becoming pay me bands, and it isnt until there are too few good pay me bands that you get enough of a crowd to make being a free beer band worth it to your self image.

DUI is killing the free beer bands and the ones that want to get paid by the venues that are using their music to sell beer. Just curious to see how that will play out. Great post, BTW. Thanks for that.

"As younger coders come along, I get the strong sense there is a distinct shift away from these roots and toward a more Ayn Randian philosophy, largely adopted by younger Silicon Valley venture capitalists..."

Suggested viewing, All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_(TV_series). The Ayn Rand fandom among those in the tech industry is not a new thing by any means.

I don’t see what you do and I disagree with the basic assumption. A prime mover is not the same as an alpha dog. Larry Wall is a prime mover. There is no zero sum game here. I’m a senior dev at a Fortune 10 company only because there are prime movers willing to blaze the way for others like me who want to work hard, but maybe not that hard.

A monk said: You offer very bad arguments again and again…

A monk replies–

Like the ancient immortals said
Don’t want ’em to get your goat
Don’t show ’em where it’s hid
But that’s just what I did
            –Van Halen, “Stay Frosty”

So, I have some more bad arguments to offer, again–

We’re going to solve all the problems of the world obviously. We’re not going to give up on altruism … I thought I would try to defend Objectivist Philosophy…

Objectivism clarifies the cognitive dissonance required to emit that text–

• Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive.
• We cannot fight against collectivism, unless we fight against its moral base: altruism. We cannot fight against altruism, unless we fight against its epistemological base: irrationalism.
• If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
• [Altruism] is a moral system which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the sole justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, value and virtue. This is the moral base of collectivism, of all dictatorships.
• What most moralists—and few of their victims—realize is that reason and altruism are incompatible.
• Altruism does not mean mere kindness or generosity, but the sacrifice of the best among men to the worst, the sacrifice of virtues to flaws, of ability to incompetence, of progress to stagnation-and the subordinating of all life and of all values to the claims of anyone’s suffering.
• Men have been taught that their first concern is to relieve the suffering of others. ... To make that the highest test of virtue is to make suffering the most important part of life. Then man must wish to see others suffer in order that he may be virtuous. Such is the nature of altruism.
• Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society.
• Guilt is altruism’s stock in trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuation.

To all this objectivist talk I respond: to all things their own season.

What I listen for in every philosophy are absolutes. They are the 'tell' for intolerance.

When I was a kid playing basketball I was a pretty bad dribbler and my shots were lousy and off-balance but I learned pretty quickly how to 'read' a person's stance, their eyes, head position, and eventually whatever 'tells' they consistently presented before driving for a shot. I would strategically place myself in their path with my hands right where the ball was going to be. Result? Either they fouled me or the ball would pop right out into of one of my teammate's paths. Score!

We do not live in a binary world, so a discussion of opposites is often illusory. The ancient symbol of the yin and yang are superior to this form of thinking. In all good there is some bad and vice versa.

Next, back to this business of seasons. True, the weak require altruism. So do ones children. So do plants in the field. So do bees and crocodiles from time to time. When altruism is overused, like too much medicine, it becomes a problem. When objectivism is overused, similarly, it becomes a problem.

Celebrate Intellectual Diversity

WTF Your Mother, who is going glue back all those broken illusions?!