The phrase "love me, or hate me, but don't ignore me" is a serious marketing mistake, in any context. It's a transparently selfish cry for attention. Rather than offering something great to the audience, you're trying to win pity points by subtly accusing them of poor judgement: You should be paying attention to X, but you aren't!
Believe me, if people wanted to pay attention to your project, they would find a way to do so. And if your project is being politely but firmly ignored, and you're not getting the message, it is not the audience's problem. They've responded to your message. That response is somehow not getting through to you.
Perl needs no more criticism. Even the criticism of Perl is old news. Yegge's essay, cited elsewhere on this thread, is five years old. I suspect he has little to add to it, and neither do I. I'm glad Perl's users are happy and productive, I was really grateful for it ten years ago, and I have seen nothing that makes me regret my decision to stop using it.
Have a look at MooseX::Declare and MooseX::MultiMethod then - the ability to add syntax to the language combined with a stunningly flexible, extensible metaprotocol is a huge win.
About the only object system I can pull similarly beautiful tricks in is CLOS. python and ruby don't even come close.
Oh, and before somebody yells "but but it's a library", that's a good thing - it means the syntax and semantics can be changed without needing to produce a new incompatible interpreter version. Ruby 1.9 and Python 3 have both run into adoptions problems because of compatibility issues, whereas the Perl5 language v10 (and soon v12) don't/won't have nearly the same adoption problems because we focus on enabling libraries to improve the language rather than on baking in additional features.
Not that there aren't advantages to shoving things into the compiler and VM directly, but I'm not sure I believe that in this case they outweigh the advantages of keeping things as libraries.
The phrase "love me, or hate me, but don't ignore me" is a serious marketing mistake, in any context.
OK, but don't think that one blog is the voice of the Perl community. One blog shows the opinion of one blogger; nothing more. Amazingly, "the Perl community" does not have one single voice, as it consists of tens of thousands of people all over the world.
(Also, if blog noise was a good measure of langauge popularity, it would be clear that the most popular programming language right now is Go.)
Believe me, if people wanted to pay attention to your project, they would find a way to do so. And if your project is being politely but firmly ignored, and you're not getting the message, it is not the audience's problem. They've responded to your message. That response is somehow not getting through to you.
One thing I've learned from social news sites is that this is not correct. People mostly want to find ways to justify their insecurities. If they don't know very much about programming, but pick language X, they will hang around people that like language X and that say good things about language X. Then they feel smart by association, and since they have lots of friends saying lots of good things about language X, they can feel good for "making the right decision". Being down on language Y and language Z also help reinforce that feeling. If language X is unpopular, then they're clearly in the so-much-smarter-than-everyone-else majority. If language X is popular, then it's clear that it's the best. If it weren't good, why would it have so many users?
And so on.
These are not technical arguments, they are just emotion. Confusing them with technical arguments is quite silly.
Yegge's essay, cited elsewhere on this thread, is five years old. I suspect he has little to add to it, and neither do I.
It's worth noting that Perl has changed significantly in five years. All of that criticism has resulted in many major changes in how people use Perl, such that the criticism is probably no longer valid.
But of course, people like to recycle that criticism because They Picked Something Else, and drunken rants from five years ago make them believe that Something Else is the right choice.
(I am not sure how valid it was five years ago, actually. It was more a criticism of Amazon's hiring practices, or perhaps a note about how poorly managed the programmers were. I would love to write an essay about how bad Python is, because I have seen some absolutely horrible Python code... but I realize that it's bad because it was written by someone who didn't know how to program, not because Python is intrinsically bad.)
Actually guilt works as a marketing device, but only for the short term. Guilt marketing might force someone to buy a particular brand, but it doesn't change one's attitudes toward the brand overall.
Believe me, if people wanted to pay attention to your project, they would find a way to do so. And if your project is being politely but firmly ignored, and you're not getting the message, it is not the audience's problem. They've responded to your message. That response is somehow not getting through to you.
Perl needs no more criticism. Even the criticism of Perl is old news. Yegge's essay, cited elsewhere on this thread, is five years old. I suspect he has little to add to it, and neither do I. I'm glad Perl's users are happy and productive, I was really grateful for it ten years ago, and I have seen nothing that makes me regret my decision to stop using it.