Perl and Online Communities

Today, the ever amazing xkcd released a new map of online communities. Until last year or so, most of the Perl community resided on "email land". Granted, it's a huge place, but not so pretty, and foreigners probably needed a visa to enter - or at least someone inside to give you directions and keep you out of trouble. Oh, we also have our cozy and warm "irc isles", but let's face it: it's not that big an empire.

Then the Ironman Challenge came, and people followed. Or, rather, blogged. And what a great thing it is! Our brave explores went out of their comfort zones and right into the blogosphere core, planting the camel flag and claiming more ground for Perl.

Lots of us also settled on the huge Twitter continent, showcasing Perl to contacts and followers. Others have decided to head north and are now bravely fighting the flames of Reddit, Digg and several other web forums, getting more and more Perl news out of the annoying old myths and into the Slashdot effect - and what a nice bootstrapping this is, being that Slashdot itself is written in Perl!

What lies ahead? Right now, the great (and greatly addictive) Lacuna Expanse game is taking Modern Perl straight right into the "MMO Isle", where I'm sure very nice things await. It's the new land of opportunity for Perl apps. And it's already integrated to Facebook, another promising shore for the Perl programming language and its ever growing community.

Now if you excuse me, I have a Spy Pod waiting to be launched against the evil Perigrin's Estate. Erm, I mean... work, yeah. ;-)