Okay, thank you for your reply. I understand where you are coming from and hope I am not offending you too much. (Though your bombshell thread is quite offensive to others.) That is, it sure is hard to tell you Anonymous people apart from each other! :)

Things are not black and white, which can be annoying (to me too, often). There is a spectrum of commercialism and of course if things were as bad as you suggest be assured there are enough intelligent people involved that equilibrium would be regained.

Indeed, I am very happy that the Perl community seems to have a relatively high level of intelligence and sincerity, and PM gets visits from kind students, pros, and Perl Gods far more than maybe is always deserved. The Perl Community also reaches out to corporations for sponsorship, as with the Perl Foundation Grants which are an amazing thing. Perhaps the goal of many Perl programmers is to be able to contribute to the Perl world, to donate time or money for example, by adding a module to CPAN, evangelising or teaching coding style. So you are not an outsider to be sure and I can see why you would prefer to be Mr. A. Monk.

I don't know Merlyn personally, but I don't have enough time in the day to worry about what he might or might not think. In general he seems to be a positive force for good I think.

Ditto for O'Reilly. One thing I can say is I was at a recent Lightweight Language Day & Night event in Tokyo which was a massive blast. Totally sold out so I couldn't get to the evening event which was a bummer, and the entry way was indeed commercial with an O'Reilly table there (others too of course). There was little space to talk to people and half was taken up by such tables. Personally I would have appreciated a less commercial situation but it does cost money to do it, I'd like to see more such events.

In fact there is a massive Perl event YAPC::Asia coming up in Tokyo March 29-30 and I will definitely be there, but I find it a bit expensive and the tickets sold out instantaneously! (I finagled a seat by going through International signup). It would have been much cooler I think if they could have gotten a university to donate some massive space, and allow students to come free with a lower entry fee in general. Though I have not been to other YAPC so I don't know what to expect it seems the most important thing is to get critical mass of Perl people in one place. On the other hand, if it makes money there will be more.

I do agree with you about Perl being a wonderful language. However talented people are being attracted to Python too, and you have to wonder why for example wxPython has so many more resources than wxPerl (recently covered in a Wx::Perl thread). We don't need Perl for Dummies but we do need to tell people the good news about Perl and to support Perl learning and development. O'Reilly does a good job of that.

As for the domain, .com means commercial. I recommend you contribute to a non-commercial perl website or create your own, perhaps focused on a certain perl topic so it is easy for others to also contribute too. I totally understand your attitude to commercialism but I think your comments about O'Reilly go too far. They have their place in the universe and they are a good example of a company that can fulfill its raison d'etre (to make money) while giving back to the community. This is why I really would like to encourage you to praise O'Reilly for what they do, and encourage other companies to back Perl too. Put another way, how much would they have to contribute to make it okay in your book? They do it in their way and you can do it in yours.

While your attitude is valid and understandable intellectually, it is clear with the number of people with articles and books at O'Reilly that many people have not yet reached a pain threshold. Or to put it another way, you are right in one way but if you compare Perl, which was created from day one as a Practical Extraction and Reporting Language i.e. to solve real world problems, and which continues to be used widely in business, to say Smalltalk or some other language which is primarily educational and academic, you can see that the degree of corporate involvement in the community is proportional to the presence of business users of a language. I don't know if there is a solution but you may enjoy a more relaxed state of mind if you surf away from perl.com and contribute to .org sites. There is a tendency to imagine that while hardware costs money, software is free and pure in a philosophical and academic sense. But we are living in the same world, and our lives are bound up together. Personally I seem to be better at doing nonprofit things than at making money and this is a problem unless you're independently wealthy, that's the world we are in. Can you not live and let live? Please share your labors and rest assured criticism is accepted and registered.

Matt R.