Jesse Shy

After reading the blog here a couple of weeks ago about taking 10 minutes to look for the answer before asking your fellow dev, and several other things of late about the state of documentation and such, I wanted to take some time to say this: "Things can always be improved upon, but for the most part, the Perl community does an awesome job of documenting. Whether in formal docs or giving clear answers on the web." What's my evidence? I have been using Perl since 1997. I have used it in my role as a system or network admin and as an actual programmer. I have used it at small businesses, large corps, an ILEC where we served voice, video and web services. I have used it to build monitoring and maintenance apps and even a billing app. I often get projects where the original dev has left and there is no documentation and I am on my second Mojolicious app in a year. I have only worked on a team once in that time, and I was teaching Perl to the other two members (sys/network admins). I say all this to hopefully give an idea of the range of projects where I have personally used our favorite language. I have never been on a mailing list and I have been on IRC twice, once just to look and once to ask which was the better way to do something with some XML. This means that ever time I have had a problem, needed to know how to do something, what the heck does that error mean or why the f* is this not working? The answer has been in the documentation, on Perlmonks, Stackoverflow, advent calendar or a blog somewhere. Sometimes the answer is not direct (but most of the time it is). Armed with a well defined question and your favorite search engine, the Perl community has done an incredible job documenting the hows, whens and wheres; the ins and outs of the language, and modules. Yes, there is a core of devs that do development on the language or with the language that need IRC. These folks are the 1% of people doing anything with Perl (that's a fake statistic for dramatization). They and many others have done a fantastic job documenting and explaining things in a way that lets people like me (who should probably have been a mechanic) to just get stuff done. Thanks.

Go ahead now, take your shots.