On Tue, 2008-12-09 at 23:28 +0000, Tim Sweetman wrote: > > Although I think there are two further things that would help: > > * A Perl user group that didn't just insult n00bs when they turned up
I agree with this very strongly. In which context, can I call to your attention that 'n00b' isn't generally meant in any complimentary light. The words 'beginner' and 'newcomer' adequately cover what you probably meant, without throwing in derisory overtones. This is one of my little personal crusades, so don't feel too singled out :) I really do think that Perl has already suffered very serious damage from the way the middle-to-senior members of the community treat newcomers - it almost put me off Perl myself, when I joined #perl on freenode (linpeople.org then) about nine years ago and got insulted about 200 times as much as I got helped. Fortunately #linpeople were much friendlier, and that's why I'm here now (and why I'm staff on freenode now). I suspect the prevailing attitude is why so many young developers have turned to PHP over the last ten years - it's got a community that welcomes experience-free beginners who need hand-holding and help to find which of them have the potential to be good developers. Yes, we're turning away all the script kiddies and other idiots. We're also turning away the 1 in 100 (or whatever) who could learn how to write a properly designed large application - in any language.