Re: Perl Passion website

[afoken]

Hmmm, I think that collecting certificates is not the proper way to learn a language, neither a natural language nor a computer language. Collecting experience by using the language is way superior to collecting nicely printed pieces of paper.

Until yesterday, I've never heard of javapassion.com, maybe because I don't use Java that much, maybe because it's simply not that important. I don't know. Now, I had some free minutes to look at the page. From the front page, I have the impression that this is a one man show, not much of a community, and following some links didn't change that impression. The announcement stating that the content will cost money in the near future doesn't make a better impression.

If you want to support Perl, there are better ways:

• The core documentation is partly translated to non-english languages. I know of a german translation, and a few other languages. But many parts of the documentation are not yet translated. Other parts base on very old versions, new parts still have to be translated.
• Most of those translations happen completely outside of the perl development. Integrating a multi-language documentation into the perl source tree should provide you with work for years.
• The available core documentation is huge, several documents are overlapping, and several documents haven't been touched for years. Cleaning up that would be a great help.
• You could pick a project and contribute useful howtos, cookboks, tutorials, whatever kind of documentation could be useful for the users of the project. Even if you don't get them included into the projects source tree, you could still post them here, in the Tutorials section.
• Learn Perl and try to help HERE. No one expects you to be an expert for Perl's often strange internals within a week, and we rarely need such expertise here. Lots of the questions asked here are really easy to answer. Sometimes, all you need to know is where the answer is already given.

You considered yourself being a newbie. I don't think that this is the best qualification for someone willing to teach on a given subject. Or is your plan just to provide a platform that the "real" Perl gurus are expected to fill with content, lessons and the like? Let me assume you would really get them to work for you for free. Who will take care of administrating the platform? You as a newbie? I don't think that even that would be a good idea. Newbies often run into traps that make their work vulnerable. I don't think we need yet another platform written in Perl that is vulnerable to trivial attacks.

Alexander