Sure, this post is going to get me loads of negatives and probably irritate certain people, but I know I'm not alone the position I'm at and well connecting to others who feel my frustration and can empathise with it and help from the position I am currently at is, I feel, the only way I can make any progress right now, so negative votes and public humiliation be damned, I'm damn well going to say what I have to say and I don't care if you don't like it.

So for those who don't know the story, here it is in a nutshell, prior to discovering perlmonks and prior to really knowing much about CPAN, I built at great lengths of effort piecing together bits and bobs of information from various google searches, a system which I called aXML.

I honestly believed my many many months of effort had produced something good, something worth sharing with others, so I did, and the rest is as you might say, history. Because unbeknownst to me, in the dark recesses of the uncharted world of Perl, many others had trodden many similar paths, and come to unknown concensuses about how things should be done.

So I took it on board that my system was crap, utterly worthless, obsolete, the work of a moron who doesn't know any better... because that is the MESSAGE I was given by this place and the people who frequented it at the time. For a long time I drifted away from the world of programming entirely filled my time with doing computer technician work, and so on.

I never really stopped programming, or learning things, I just didn't open my gob up to talk about it on places like this, already knowing just exactly what to expect if I did.

After a long time, lots of expirements, a failed dotcom startup which was ruined by idiotic investors, I had reached a point of confidence that I could build large applications using my system, and that such large systems were very much neater and tidier than the spaghetti mess of various systems by various "professional" programmers I had been exposed to, and so I gained enough confidence in myself and my work to expose it again.

SLAM! same effect only now amplified and fuelled even harder by the apparency of EGO in my words that had taken years to build up the confidence to say. People called me delusional, sick, manipulative; alsorts of freaky projections on my character were made from alsorts of freaky angles as people applied lame armchair psychology to what was going on without a thought or a care as to accuracy of their assertions or the impact of their words.

Once again I reeled from experience, but I'm not going off for another 4 years again this time... oh no no no. Another experience I just had has just fuelled my fire again.

So I started looking into PSGI and Plack and really liking it. I did experiments and got a slightly modified version of aXML working very fast indeed. But the niggling doubts from my previous experiences continue to eat at me, and so I decided to approach a certain very well respected programmer on here, who I won't name, and I asked him if there was any chance he could chuck together a very basic little barebones set of files to start me off based on how he does things.

My intention was to adhere religiously to the pattern produced, to learn from my prior experiences with aXML as far as possible, but ultimately to ditch aXML and embrace the "kosher" way of doing things.

The guy's response was great, He seemed more than willing to put me on the right lines, but then he said something which struck me as odd at first. He said he would need a few days to put something together as everything was tied together with his current projects.

I waited a couple of days and then I thought, hold on, what ever happened to loose coupling? My system, the much vaunted and publicly labelled apparent pile of shite, that it is, is loosely coupled. I could zip up the core of the thing and pass it on to someone who, if they knew the system, could begin a new production with it almost instantly after editing just one config file.

If the performance of the system under stress wasn't a problem I would have no need whatsoever to continue this day after day struggle to find scraps of information and assemble this jigsaw because from my perspective, I'm reinventing wheels that I have already invented, re-solving problems I've already solved and had to solve alone out of necessity because the solutions which already existed were either unknown to me, or too difficult to find or understand.

I know I'm not alone in this position. I've heard it said that most perl programmers hand roll their own solutions. I know it's easy to just assume that EVERYONE who does so is going to come up with something which is of significantly lesser quality than the established systems. But then that is a generalisation, and sometimes it's going to be wrong... completely and totally dead wrong.

I don't expect, as one person so elequently put it, that the Perl world should fall at my feet and embrace my system, but it would be nice, if anyone ANYONE would look at the situation I have, and help me move forward from where I ACTUALLY am AT, instead of everyone just slating me off, voting me down, ignoring the problem and hoping I will go away.

I just want to add also, not everyone here has a job or is rowing their boat merrily down the stream. The internet in general dis-associates people from the true impact of their comments and words on others, whilst it might seem fun or trivial to have a little bash at the egomaniac with shit code, what you cannot possibly know is that when said egomaniac gets pissed off and declares "I'm going to the pub", it can very well be the case that said egomaniac drinks often because said egomaniac cannot afford FUCKING DENTISTRY.

Now as far as I am concerned, I built something sweet, went to share it openly and altruistically, and I received a sentence of PAIN from this place.

And I know I am not alone.