So the current meme going around the Perl community looks like this:
- How does Perl help you in your daily work?
- How could it help you better?
- If Perl is helping you, are there ways you could help Perl and other users of Perl?
I want to rule a couple of these questions out of court, for two reasons.
First, Perl is a tool and not an end in itself. That's a hard one to remember. And yes, while that's still not an excuse for taking the tool for granted, tools aren't responsible for what you do with them. I don't continually thank my ink pen (or even vi) because it helps me write great essays - I have to write the essay, not the pen. Perl might help me write great programs, but it's still me who writes the program.
Second, what is Perl these days? A twenty year old language? A ten year old interpreter? A useful collection of thousands of modules by a wide range of authors? Documentation and books to help me program better? All of the above? In that case, "supporting Perl" doesn't make sense; it's spread too thin. And if all of these things are what helps me now, why should it be that "supporting Perl" exclusively means paying people to work on a new language? - because that was, after all, the ulterior motive of Allison's questions.
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