Way back in the late '90s and early 2000s, many Perl fans could rattle off a list of big projects using Perl: Slashdot, Amazon.com, IMDB. Eyebrows popped up (maybe at one point), as if the fact that billions of dollars of online sales went through Perl were validation of a language.

Perhaps it is.

Today much of the online Perl community discussion reads as reactionary, at least to me. Some random Internet argument will degrade into "Perl? Isn't that insert negative description here?" versus "Nuh uh, Perl isn't insert negative description here!"

Me, I'd rather hear about interesting new projects written in Perl. Take the recent Duck Duck Go written in Perl story. Repeat this a few dozen times (especially with new projects created in the past year or two) and responses will move from "Perl? People still use that?" to "Wow, people who know Perl can certainly do a lot of interesting things!"

I'd rather see the latter message spread than almost any other marketing message—so tell the world, what are you working on with Perl?