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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Perl Programmers Don't Go To Meetings 2 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • This argument is meant to compose my thoughts on a possible explanation why the Java user group is much more active than the Perl user group - a mystery that I'd like to solve so I can do something about. It isn't meant to be flame bait thought if you have strong feelings, flame away. However listing all of the reasons I might be wrong isn't helpful to me or anyone. Here are some suggestions for how you might constructively comment on this:

    If not attending is an act of laziness, could it be turned into or poven to be an act of false laziness? Programming experience is pretty obvious - operating at a novice level for an extended period of time is obviously false hubris and false laizness - can failure to make professional contacts be classified the same way?

    It is obvious that the agenda of Perl Mongers meetings isn't to tell you some commercial product (atleast not here in Phoenix), but I offer this as one of the possible mechanisms. Face it - meetings usually suck. And my experience is that Perl programmers don't only want to socialize. They want to socialize as a secondary activity to sharpening skills and being entertained by a presenter. Okey, that would be tierciary. To combat this, I've been experimenting with more explicit agendas that defeat this subconcious assumption - groups explicitly take time to look at peoples broken code, give people time to mention CPAN modules they've found recently, and other things that kind of sound like something you might like to do - some agenda item that suits your agenda.

    -scott
    • Why bother worrying about it? I don't understand. Meetings are not going to make better programmers. Going [back?] to college is going to teach you more theory, which will make you a stronger programmer. However, school also tends to teach you nothing about practical programming concerns and practices. This is experience is gained by going out on the net, searching, downloading other people's code, reading bug reports, trying software, doing performance tests, weighing features and drawbacks, and if yo
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