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 All of that criticism has resulted in many major changes in how people use Perl, such that the criticism is probably no longer valid.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.)
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.)