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in reply to Improve Perl's marketing position by making Perlmonks more discoverable for automated "popularity contests"

On the surface, I don't really care what outsiders say about Perl. I'll keep using it as long as it has any following at all. Beneath that, I sort of like getting paid (where Perl is at least part of my worth). Even better, I like that other people write/maintain the packages I need (ignoring the guilt of not having uploaded any of my own yet). Greater popularity for Perl means getting paid more with less work -- and that's obviously good (ignoring the ego now).

On the down-side, this all feels a bit dirty somehow. Hard to explain really but it's like a scam to drum up popularity. It's not like a lie but why should we need to advertise (besides those selfish reasons above)?

A way to justify this (at least to me) is that it's an obviously true statement. This could just be seen as a clarification, almost like going towards Semantic Web -- using the correct tags/keywords.

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Re^2: Improve Perl's marketing position by making Perlmonks more discoverable for automated "popularity contests"
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Mar 15, 2013 at 18:24 UTC
    It's not like a lie but why should we need to advertise...

    "But you have to allow a little for the desire to evangelize when you think you have good news." — Larry Wall in 1992.

Re^2: Improve Perl's marketing position by making Perlmonks more discoverable for automated "popularity contests"
by topher (Scribe) on Mar 16, 2013 at 20:55 UTC
    On the down-side, this all feels a bit dirty somehow. Hard to explain really but it's like a scam to drum up popularity. It's not like a lie but why should we need to advertise (besides those selfish reasons above)?

    I don't really see the dirty aspect, myself. If we were putting that statement on non-Perl pages, then I would consider it dirty. But all we're really doing is improving the accuracy of their poor method of tracking language statistics. Yes, it's dumb that we need to do this kind of thing, but not dirty.

    Somewhat separately, what's wrong with advertising? I like Perl. I like using it, and I like when other people use it. The bigger and healthier the Perl community is, the more useful Perl is. As long as we're being honest, and not misleading people, there's nothing wrong with advertising in my mind.

    I don't feel I need any justification to encourage people to use a programming language that I believe is incredibly useful. If someone hadn't encouraged me to play with Perl many years ago, I may have ended up stuck using a less awesome language.

    Christopher Cashell
      don't see the dirty aspect

      "Dirty" doesn't summarize the proposal to me. I'm definitely in favor of increasing Perl's exposure/popularity and am thankful that someone "advertised" to me.

      But, to explain my hesitation, this almost sounds like begging for attention. I'd rather let people appreciate the language for what it is rather than adjusting pages to look better to spiders. Sounds silly/naive but that's what I meant.

        Fair enough.

        I think we're both looking at this from very similar perspectives, just with a slightly different view of where it falls on the sliding scale of pragmatism vs righteousness.

        Christopher Cashell
Re^2: Improve Perl's marketing position by making Perlmonks more discoverable for automated "popularity contests"
by mithaldu (Monk) on Mar 16, 2013 at 00:43 UTC
    A way to justify this (at least to me) is that it's an obviously true statement. This could just be seen as a clarification, almost like going towards Semantic Web -- using the correct tags/keywords.

    That is not just a justification, that is entirely my intent. :)
      justification

      "Justification" as a way to overcome doubts. Would be more fair to say "a different way to look at this" with the implication that the positive outweighs the negative.

        I was trying to express that in my mind there were ZERO doubts about this. A flawed, but stable algorithm is hurting us. We can either complain about it, or figure out what we can do to make the algorithm do the right thing. Once that is understood there should not be a doubt in any person's mind. :)