| That's a very silly data point for several reasons. First, the age of 30 is arbitrary, unless there's some reason that only the experiences of people under 30 matters. Perhaps everyone over 30 stops coding, or dies, or fails to create anything interesting -- but you haven't demonstrated that. Second, the choice of Atlanta is arbitrary. Is Atlanta a sufficient statistical representative of all of the locations of programmers in the world? Third, your choice of "people I know" is arbitrary. Can you demonstrate that you know a representative sample of available programmers in the Atlanta area? (What happens if you expand the definition of "programmers" to include "people who occasionally write a program"?) Fourth, your experience doesn't compare. An anecdote is not a piece of data. The rate of change on the CPAN is not the sole determinant of Perl's viability, but there is a single, well-understood place to share reusable code with other Perl programmers. It's measurable data, and it's normative for certain types of Perl usage. What you provided isn't data. It's just noise. |
What about that noise? This is pretty typical Perl thinking: pretend everything is ok, nothing to see here. Lots of CPAN commits, we have one metric to cling to. Everything is ok.