i almost hate to admit it, but you've got a point with that talk of yours. when i first came to perlmonks, i was simply flabbergasted at the amount of knowledge, cooperation, and well, community within the perl community{1}.

and yet this makes me pretty possesive of my nice, for-the-most-part highly intelligent Perl community. like you'd mentioned, it could really suck if every Visual Basic coder in the world suddenly discovered Perl and it's glory. (We'd have e-mail clients that would be vulnerable to .pl worms in no time!)

does this make me snobbish, or stingy? maybe a little..

ofcourse, i also have to concede that if the Perl community as a whole, and/or perlmonks had been secretive at the time i joined, i wouldn't have had the opportunity to find such a wonderful community. i might even have given up on Perl completely - i highly doubt it, but one can never know. I wouldn't have been able to ask any of our resident Perl book authors questions on which was best to learn what from, or any of numerous things that this site's helped me with. so maybe, just maybe it's a Good Thing [tm] that it has such an open and free admission. (:

{1} the main reason i was amazed at this, was because i'd never seen anything of the sort for another language. i think this is sad, since while i'll always be most at home while coding Perl, i do use other languages on occasion. 'The right tool for the right job', and all that. it'd be pretty keen if i could find something like 'Cmonkeys.org' or 'asMongrels.net' to check my code against. (: [back]