use Perl

The synopsis of Moose.pm has this innocent-looking line:

use Moose; # automatically turns on strict and warnings

Which begs the question: "How does that work?" In this blog post, I'll try to uncover some of the magic of Perl pragmata.

Full post

[Cross-posted from my Perl blog to use.perl in its entirety so that more people might read it.]

Warning: Rant ahead.

Reacting to the recent meme of "We don't have enough Perl sites", I've started a blog. I've written blog posts every day, sometimes several times per day, but get hardly any visitors. I don't like the idea of link-spamming indiscriminately, so I've only announced new blog posts on use.perl and on Twitter.

Of course, it is entirely possible that the topics I write about are not very interesting. It has been suggested that I should write about things that would cause others to want to link to my blog. Well, I don't have any intentions of sucking up to anybody just to get visitors. I had hoped to write about things I encountered along the way and that I found interesting. I didn't merely want to write about my own modules but also about other sorts of things, especially interesting CPAN modules I've found, or news from the Perl world in Japan and Korea. So I thought of the blog as a community service rather than a wank.

Andy Lester wrote an article in his Perl Buzz blog: Perl must decentralize, diversify and colonize. I agree. Schwern said pretty much the same thing in his "Perl is unDead" talk at YAPC::Asia 2008.

However, saying that there should be more Perl sites is good, but then you should help in driving traffic to those sites as well.

For example - and this is not meant to single out one blogger - Perl Buzz links to the official perl pages, and the official perl pages link to Perl Buzz. I have asked for my blog to be included in planet.perl.org, but didn't even get a response. So the Perl in-crowd link gets all chummy and link to each other and write lots about their own blogs and their own modules, but the small sites are left to fend for themselves.

Put your money where your mouth is.

To be clear, I don't complain about not having thousands of visitors; rather I am disappointed in the nonchalant way in which well-known people who attract lots of visitors from outside the active Perl community proclaim that there must be more Perl sites, but when they do appear, leave them out in the cold.

Nor do I want to single out a specific prolific blogger. I am appealing to all the top Perl bloggers.

Nor do I expect, after having complained about the situation, to have lots of links to my blog suddenly spring up - I am disillusioned to the point where I don't want to continue my blog anymore. Rather, I wanted to highlight a bigger problem.

There are many interesting things happening in the Perl world. Please start writing about them, and start to interact with other Perl blogs.

I've pushed out the final four ideas for blog posts onto my Perl blog. Thanks for reading this far!

Blogged "Korean Perl Terms" in my Perl blog.

Blogged "Dissecting the Moose Part 1" in my Perl blog.

Blogged "The Way of Approaching" about a hackathon in Korea in my Perl blog.

New blog entry: "Korean Perl Workshop 2008" in my Perl blog.

New blog entry: "The Eskimo Greeting Operator" in my Perl blog.

New blog entry: "Perl V 10.0" in my Perl blog.