perlmeditation moritz <p>Five years ago I joined perlmonks. Before we discussed a strange regex feature on the German Perl IRC channel, and it [id://616538|spilled over to perlmonks]. My [id://616545|first post] came out anonymously, but I believe it is the only node I ever wrote anonymously.</p> <p>Obviously I enjoy my time here, and I want to reflect on some positive and negative aspects of perlmonks. Positive things first:</p> <ul> <li>Great community; most questions get answered quite well and fast</li> <li>Friendly, helpful and witty community</li> <li>The CB catches most off-topic discussions</li> <li>Very nice link syntax (<c>[mod://CGI]</c>, <c>[doc://$@]</c> etc)</li> <li>Motivating and IMHO fair XP system</li> </ul> <p>Most of my critisms relates to the technical aspects of perlmonks, which shows its age:</p> <ul> <li>Poor Unicode support (try to use non-Latin-1 characters in <c><code></c> blocks)</li> <li>Poor hackability: it's closed source, and even if you get access to the source, it's hard to set up a test system, and to get started hacking</li> <li>Unnecessary high barrier to entrance. Why does one have to use <c><p></c> or <c><br></c> tags to get a somewhat readable node?</li> <li>I feel that somtimes trolls get too much attention. I don't have a good solution for that, but sometimes I feel there must be more that could be done. (Maybe grey out nodes with reputation <= -5, hide them and their subtrees by default, and abolish [Worst Nodes]?)</li> </ul> <p>I firmly believe that these problems are solvable, though I don't see myself in the position to solve them.</p> <p>Most importantly I want to thank all the monks for teaching me incredible amounts about Perl and about Programming, and for providing me with interesting problems to think about.</p> <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-616540"> [http://perl6.org/|Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed] </div></div>