Re^2: The Enlightened Perl Iron Man Competition

[mr_mischief]

In a world in which many people judge a language's viability by the number of pages returned by Google, news sites, tutorial sites, tool sites, or even personal rambling sites (which many blogs fit under) can make a difference in awareness. This is despite the fact that some consider a properly indexed site to present only a small handful of pages for indexing, with other pages available in proper context through links from those. Numbers boost visibility, and visibility is equated by many to viability.

Should we all go out and write inane blather about the functions we added to a log analyzer used only in-house or about the bug just fixed because Perl's testing frameworks made it easier to uncover and isolate? In most cases, no. If it's done using a technique really novel and exciting or in a way that hasn't been covered properly before then yes. Just try to limit the inanity and blather when doing the writing.

A proper site discussing how Perl has helped you or what strengths the language and community offer in general terms can muffle the sites offering good advice and code. However, they can also link to those sites that offer good advice and code. If there were thousands of personal anecdotes about what Perl has to offer, and they all would link to Perlmonks, perl.org, use.perl.org, parrotcode.org, and rakudo.org then all those sites will be easily found. They'll also get higher rankings from the search engines as more and higher-quality sites link to them. Linking to more formal resources is pretty common in blogs, and should be encouraged.

It'd be nice if the search engines allowed one to filter out certain site types in results, like 'Perl --no-blogs --no-adtraps', but AFAIK there's not really a foolproof way to make those decisions in the engine. There's not even a solid enough distinction in people's minds collectively among a forum, an official news source with comments, an official news source without comments, and a blog. I think it's better to have more "Perl is great, it helpd me do X in only Y hours instead of Z days" to counteract the "OMG Perl is so 1980's, I wasn't alive then so I can't think of programming in it" and "Perl went away with the arrival of digital Internet connections -- there is no more line noise" blurbs. If there's noise in your search results already, would you rather leave the negative noise intact and generate no positive noise to counter it?