I don’t post very often, but I’m going to try to change that. Is this my fifth attempt?

This time, to give myself a goal, I joined the Perl Ironman Challenge and I will try to blog at least once a week about Perl. So…

Perl: it’s alive!

There have been lots of reports over the last few years about Perl being dead. Those reports upset a lot of Perl mongers, and I didn’t fully understand that. Perl was not a family member, friend, or pet; so why the strong emotion? It was never really “alive”, so how did it “die”? And all these upset people were still using Perl, so they kept it breathing. And there were many more Perl users who weren’t upset, maybe because they never heard about the death.

It seems to me that Perl never died: it just became unfashionable for a while. And during the unfashionable period Perl did have some self-image issues, and maybe a lot of misdirected energy. But being unfashionable isn’t life-threatening.