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.