Perl Programming

I see Tim Bunce is up in arms again writing TIOBE Index is being gamed and Adam Kennedy suggests that we should game SuperCollider Programming into the most popular language.

Actually I think with the suggestion that every Perl programmer should include Perl Programming on all her web pages we can reach a better measurement of popularity. Not in terms of number of lines of code which we know how bad is, nor in terms of CVs mentioning the language, which might just mean lots of people out of job but in true love of the language. After all, only real gamers will get involved in this, people who really like that language. So by encouraging all the language communities to swamp all possible web pages with XYZ programming we might get to a better measurement of how popular a language is.

This will probably drive COBOL out of the race as few COBOL programmers have extensive blogs or web pages but it will give a more accurate measurement of the Internet aware languages.

This will probably further reduce the position of Perl as well. Either because we will be serious - like Time Bunce - rejecting the whole idea of gaming the system or we will follow the suggestion of Adam Kennedy and actually promote SuperCollider instead of Perl.

Back in 2000 I work at the First Interned Domain Investment Bank where we had 35,000 domain names hosted on a single server. At one point I wrote a 5 lines long application that displayed slightly unique information on every one of those pages. Then I extended it by another 5 lines fetching the unique description of each page from a file where the investment bankers were describing our assets. I could even link between the various sites based on categories and languages. Reusing that infrastructure would give the Perl Programmers a nice advantage. Although I am not sure if that would be fair game, as the code was written in PHP.

This blog entry was written in accordance to the rules of the Iron Man Perl Blogging Challenge that requires quantity of blogs, not quality. For more such posts, please visit the Iron Man Planet.