use Perl

I ran into the Linux Mag with the article about
WWW:Mechanize.  It finally got me interested in Perl
(had been using PHP on some stuff).  Coming from a VB,
Java, C++ and C# background it took me a while to get
used to the sigils. lol.  Been playing with it for a
couple of weeks now.  I had been looking for a tool
like WWW::Mechanize for a long time.  Any plans to
expand on this module?

... # many questions about WWW::Mechanize

I wanted to let you know that your ideas/code had
brought another person into the Perl fold.

Thanks,

I was chatting w/Uri the other day and he said, roughly, "No knock on you or Mechanize, but I don't understand its popularity. It really doesn't do that much." He's right, of course. It's basically a wrapper around LWP::UserAgent, HTML::Parser and HTML::Form.

So why is it so popular? Is it just that people talk about it? It fits a niche need that people need and makes it accessible? It's not even anything I've done so much. All I did was fork it from WWW::Automate, fix some bugs, and talk about it.

Is discussion the key? Is it a social thing? Is talking about the tools we write what it takes?

And how cool is it that a given module sells Perl as a language? Who would have thought of WWW::Mechanize as a killer app?