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in reply to Re: Breaking Out of the Perl Echo Chamber: A Call to Action
in thread Breaking Out of the Perl Echo Chamber: A Call to Action
here, comp.lang.perl.misc, perl.beginners, etc
I asked for an effort to break out of the echo chamber, not reinforce it… :-)
Perl should have a voice in places where people from many languages come together. If the Perl community keeps to itself, how is anyone else to know that a Perl community even exists any more? (Answer: they don’t.)
And you aren’t going to get people who have no idea that there is a Perl community to come to the Perl community when they have questions. So they will ask where they will get worse answers than they could have gotten. The amount of people who have contact with Perl but not its community or any of the things the community has achieved and learned is staggering, and their (sometimes indifferent, sometimes inevitable) ignorance is self-reinforcing and ultimately results in a much worse reputation for Perl than it deserves.
The onus is on us to break that cycle. If we want Perl’s name to be widely associated with the things that Perl stands for, we need to represent it out there in the wider community where the others go to, not stay facing inwards.
Makeshifts last the longest. |
Re^3: Breaking Out of the Perl Echo Chamber: A Call to Action
by zentara (Archbishop) on Sep 19, 2008 at 12:24 UTC
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Re^3: Breaking Out of the Perl Echo Chamber: A Call to Action
by AZed (Monk) on Sep 19, 2008 at 00:48 UTC
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If the Perl community fragments into people answering questions in several different places, none of them will be good places to go to get information. The correct solution to get to the thing you want (i.e. more people know where to go to get Perl information), you need to speak with the people running StackOverflow and ask them to direct non-trivial questions about Perl to perlmonks.org.
For reference, I found Perlmonks via Google (searching on "perl forum", I believe, though I do note that "perl help" doesn't seem to find it, which isn't a good thing — maybe someone should tweak the keywords here). It was my second stop, the first being a forum that never answered my question at all.
Knowledge forking is bad. Experts don't have unlimited hours to try to keep an eye on many different locations at once. I would have been happier if that first forum hadn't existed at all.
As an aside, I note that "echo chamber" is a derogatory term, typically used to refer to groups of people with few or no individual ideas that just parrot the loudest talking point currently in use. I'm not sure it's helpful to you to be using that term on the very people you're trying to lure away to join your new clubhouse.
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If the Perl community fragments into people answering questions in several different places, none of them will be good places to go to get information.
This is a pretty absurd claim. I don’t see how you can credibly make this slippery slope argument given the fragmentation that already exists. I read use.perl but hardly Perl Monks, these days. I picked up p5p a year ago, which I was never reading before. I have never posted on comp.lang.perl.misc. Presumably at least one of these places qualifies as a good place to get information in your opinion. If so, how is your position self-consistent?
I found Perlmonks via Google
Congratulations. Now, considering how many questions we get on Perl Monks from people who say “I know this is not Perl-related, but Perl Monks is the best place for this kind of thing that I’ve ever seen, so…”, how likely do you think are people new to Perl to ask Perl questions wherever they happen to already be regulars?
Knowledge forking is bad.
… why? What possible advantage does knowledge hoarding offer?
Experts don’t have unlimited hours to try to keep an eye on many different locations at once.
That is why you don’t want all the experts visiting only a single set of venues.
groups of people with few or no individual ideas that just parrot the loudest talking point currently in use.
The Perl community only sporadically pays attention to the hot issues of the rest of the programming world and almost never tries to sell its issues to a wider audience as worthy of attention, and the rest of the world happily ignores the Perl community. We’re pretty set in our ways, we know what works for us, and we are happy to leave it at that. If you don’t see that, or what’s wrong with it, then I don’t think I can help; an echo chamber never looks like one from the inside.
your new clubhouse.
If you think I care about Stack Overflow, you must not have read my posts. Another distraction is really the last thing I needed. But I care about Perl.
Makeshifts last the longest.
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… why? What possible advantage does knowledge hoarding offer?
I agree with all your general points but I also understand from where AZed is coming. It's not hoarding that's on point here, it's signal to noise.
Imagine someone posts the most mundane Perl question on SOPW and I answer with something awful, dangerous, etc. How long will my post go uncorrected by another monk? 10 minutes? An hour? Maybe a half-day if it's a weekend and the original question was overly verbose. What if I respond in a seemingly reasonable and forceful rebuttal making my answer seem more correct? How long till I'm dogpiled by better answers and further corrections from a few other monks? It's not a hoard here as much as it is a pure vein.
I visited StackOverflow a couple of days ago and started to reply to a Perl related question. Then I reread the 10 wishy-washy, naïve, 100%-opinion answers that were already there and I said to myself, Ah, f*** this. No one is going to be able to see the pearls in the mud. It's the same reason I think I've been to /. 3 or 4 times in 11 years of being online all day.
Seeing your OP here, however, makes me strongly reconsider spending time over there. Knowing other monks might be there definitely changes the lay of things.
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I don’t see how you can credibly make this slippery slope argument given the fragmentation that already exists. I read use.perl but hardly Perl Monks, these days. I picked up p5p a year ago, which I was never reading before. I have never posted on comp.lang.perl.misc. Presumably at least one of these places qualifies as a good place to get information in your opinion. If so, how is your position self-consistent?
Because out of the places you listed there, only Perlmonks qualifies as a good place to find answers to a personal question. Use.perl appears to be news site/blogs, not community forum. P5P I hadn't even heard of until you mentioned it, and that's because it's a mailing list ostensibly devoted to further development of the language itself, which makes it a) a little difficult to find things in if you aren't tracking it continuously, b) somewhat inaccessible and difficult to find, c) not really oriented towards helping people with general Perl questions, and d) somewhat of a nuisance to maintain. Even now that I know about it, I'm unlikely to pick it up because I have more than enough junk cluttering my mail storage already. Usenet is... quiet, and has been for a long time. I got half of a functioning answer there recently, from one person, and it took longer to get it than from Perlmonks, even though I asked there a day later. I'm unlikely to bother with comp.lang.perl.misc again.
If you're looking for an active web-based question-and-answer forum for Perl questions, Perlmonks appears to be it.
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