When someone, say, writes an SMTP server in Perl, they don't... post a hyperbolic blog post about how freakin' awesome it (and they) are... they merely upload i

When someone, say, writes an SMTP server in Perl, they don't... post a hyperbolic blog post about how freakin' awesome it (and they) are... they merely upload it to CPAN. I guess I wasn't clear enough, because I agree with that, and it is in fact what I was trying to get at with my FUD-worthy sentence. Perhaps I should have put "Exciting New Developments" in silly caps to emphasize that I was talking about hype. If you want to work in a language that still has significant hype, and enjoys having hype, and doesn't try to make you feel dirty for practicing hype, you need to learn a language other than Perl. Until Perl 6 comes out, at any rate. Your post does little to convince me that I'm wrong about that. :) Personally, I like a little hype in my life. I tend to agree with Bruce Sterling: http://www.viridiandesign.org/2006/03/viridian-note-00459-emerging.html http://www.viridiandesign.org/2006/03/viridian-note-00459-em... Hype is a system-call on your attention. If hype is clearly aimed straight at your wallet, you are right to worry. But hype is only bad for you if you drink it unthinkingly, by the barrel and case. If you soberly track its development, hype is very revealing. Even mistaken and obscurantist hype shows that people are stupid and trying to hide something, which are always good things to know. In politics, the opposite of hype is political reality. Political hype is BS, it's a campaign speech, it's meant to deceive the listener. But in technology, the opposite of hype is not the truth. The opposite of hype in technology is argot. It's techno-jargon. Argot is not reality, jargon is not the truth. Argot is a super-specialized geek cult language that has no traction in the real world. Argot is the deliberately hermetic language of a small knowledge clique. I do not doubt that Perl programmers are very smart, and that they are constantly pushing the state of the art. I also do not doubt that Perl code runs the world while other languages are frivolously reinventing new and sillier forms of the wheel. (How can I? I wrote a bunch of Perl code that is currently helping to run a factory. There is every danger that this Perl code, though not a sterling example of its genre, will outlive me. I have a healthy respect for Perl's usefulness.) But I'm not convinced the language is reaching a lot of new blood. And that's an important task -- perhaps the most important task. They say that every trick in software was invented by a Lisp programmer before I was born, and they may be right. But, to the extent that this is true, that means that there is relatively little to gain right now by making languages "more powerful". The real win is to make powerful languages more clear and ubiquitous, and to teach them to more people. And reaching people requires clarity, pedagogy... and hype. You need to make a system call on their attention.