As a pure acolyte for the past ten years, when I finally took note of the need to have a good scripting language for my online business, and began writing perl spaghetti code to get simple jobs done - recently I had an epiphany.

I was having difficulty with a Perl text parsing script that 'normally' works but was utterly recalcitrant at renaming some files.

Now, please understand that I am not a programmer. Typically I hack scripts as templates to get them to work. And after enough time they normally always do. This script was an exception. Homegrown.

I tried for about two hours oin Python to get it to work. No luck. Tried Ruby, and in a few minutes it was working fine. It was my one and only time I have ever written a Ruby script.

I realized that I had a lot of programming to do in the future. I am planning on coming out of semi-retirement (assuming the economy improves) and overhaul my web sites, as well as creating a specialized library catalog for over half a million etexts.

But at that fateful moment with Ruby I had a sudden enlightenment. I have dabbled with trying to learn a host of other languages. C is simply monstrous and needlessly repetitive for my needs - its Assmebler with labels.

Java is someting I have come to hate. I have worked in multiple Java projects, only to find it pointlessly confusing and bloviated.

There is something likable about Python, but its hopelessly cracked for me. Its main strength lies in what people have done for it (modules), rather than what it can do technically, at least as easily with Perl. Mind you I speak as a dabbler, and not a pro.

Ruby showed me outright that i needed to spend as much time and effort as possible mastering Perl. Which I have been doing for the past two weeks. Relearning it from v5.10 basics. To me at least, Ruby is Perl Lite geared for OO. I have very little need for OO, which I see as needlessly complicating for non-production scripts.

My point in this meandering gibberish is this: In the past few years Perl has arisen from the dead, and nobody noticed. But most importantly, unlike Ruby and Python which seem to have decent, if not strong neophyte communities, for Perl the only site with sufficient traffic to avoid continuous necroposting is here, Unfortunately this site can be a bit intimidating for new users.

I spent the majority of last night looking for a simple forum to ask dumb questions on perl. Sorry but IRC and mailing lists are simply out for me. No way, no how. I also noticed the forums with the heaviest traffic seemed to be PHP. My experience with my web site and its support forum is that the majority of PHP users are not programmers. Hells bells, even apparently the majority of web site *designers* are not programmers.

The average person does not understand what TIMTOWTDI(sp?) means and the utter personalization of styles that Perl allows, allowing one to write utterly obfuscated, to essentially GW BASIC code. I proudly use the GOTO statement, for example. I do not write my scripts for peer review. However when I do share code, Perl allows me to spiffy it up, and become more easily readable by non-programmers. Its syntax, when not using unnecessary shortcuts is actually quite readable. Even a few *years* later. Larry is after all a linguist....

An humble suggestion would to create here amongst the giants, a *playground* where strict and warnings are left at the gates, and new folks are encouraged to play around with the code and grow with it, and even personalize it to their languages and cultures. Even a MyBB type subforum for those who find the interface here a bit inscrutable, like I did for many years.

I also believe the playground should include Rakudo, especially as with it, Perl does not seem as cracked as the forks of Python. I dont use any 'fancy' techniques in my scripts so I dont forsee any problems with Inline::Perl5, but then again I am still installing it. Its repo is painfully slow.

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