Hubris is one of the three great virtues of the programmer according to Larry Wall. But he also noted in “Open Sources” that humility was a good quality as well. Don’t get me wrong some projects have much more hubris than Perl: Python and Linux come to mind. I’m not saying all Pythoneers or Linuxers are hubris-ful. But a small minority is too loud, and there’s a similar case in Perl to a lesser extent.
What do I mean by hubris? “Perl is the greatest language since sliced bread. It has unparalleled text processing and data structures support. It is object-oriented, supports functional programming and any other programming paradigm very well. It’s perfect for almost any task, from powering web-sites to writing GUI to writing games. It’s practically LISP with in-fix notation, and runs on almost any platform imaginable...”
You get the drift? Why I think it’s bad? Because most people don’t like communities with this sales pitch. When recommending Perl to someone, you should discuss one advantage at a time, not overload him with a lot of information. When people see a lot of information they think there’s something fishy about this.
Let’s take a look at a language with just the right amount of hubris: Visual Basic. Right, a language that Microsoft has released several versions of, each adding major things, but is still inferior to perl 5.000. A language whose code can only be deployed on Windows. A language that is many times useless without a whole slew of OCX or OLE components that are freely available at best. Still, Microsoft and the other VB community do not claim it’s the greatest language on earth. “I take your word that Perl/Python/Ruby/LISP/whatever is much superior. VB is stupid, but cute and it gets the job done.” That’s the attitude we should have: Perl gets the job done. Granted, many different jobs. But as far as Mel is concerned it only gets her job done and not the entire world’s ones.