You guys are really patient with someone asking some fairly basic questions. You could easily have palmed him off to a FAQ or tutorial somewhere. Nice work.
I've always liked that the Perl community is very accessible. There's no feeling of some steep hierarchy, or much of an exclusive club, so long as you're polite and at least make an effort to understand things.
...that so many of the prominent Perl sites (at least as far as Google is concerned) are so woefully obsolete/ugly/lacking in updates. It's no wonder we have a reputation problem.
What's to stop someone downloading the same software via BitTorrent? I think that's really an argument about piracy rather than the issue at hand (and most medium to large companies don't pirate - at least on a large scale - because they can be audited).
I agree with bart... a money-back guarantee - while it wouldn't solve every problem - would at least give consumers some protection (while crucially leaving "free as in beer" alone). Anything more (as much as I'd love to see MS et al suffer for their shoddy code) really does run the risk of stifling innovation
Perl's name is mud to most people outside the community (or so it seems), but in my experience, the Java community has a very strong reputation for TDD. It's probably partly because Java is still the defacto language for a lot of new development, and a lot of new stuff tends to focus on modern practices.
But I do think the testing movement in Perl pre-dates even Java's. One reason why Perl doesn't use xUnit - it wasn't invented when the original test modules were written.
We all have biases towards our language of choice, mainly because we have more contact with that community than any other. It's usually a good idea to at least be aware of that bias.
I just hope the people teaching Computer Science degrees have realised that tradtional CompSci stuff (like optimising algorithms) is now largely irrelevant for what most of their graduates are going to be doing, and are teaching development practices like TDD, Continuous Integration, Agile, etc.
But I doubt they have.
Although I more or less accept your argument that we need to be bolder in evolving Perl 5, I think you've contradicted yourself a little bit.
You're trying to give examples that are real world, but in the real world (at least in Java and Perl), pretty much all code is going to need to rely on third party libraries, so you need some sort of dependency management system. Both Perl and Java have massive codebases to draw from, much of it open source.
So a real Java programmer is going to write classes, but they're probably also going to compose their app using Spring. Which means they either need to hack an Ant script, or configure a Maven project. Neither of which is trivial (well, configuring a basic Maven project is trivial, but trying to do anything outside the One True Maven Way is not).
The fact that so much of the Java world depends on Spring, and that most of the apps written using Java these days wouldn't be sane without it doesn't seem to bother the Java community. Why are some people so bothered that modern Perl apps need to depend on Moose (or some other framework, e.g. Catalyst, DBIx::Class, or what have you)?
