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Edit: I'm leaving this unedited, but I'll note here: the author of the site got in touch and he's done a lot to fix the stuff I hated about it or else argued coherently for it to be as it is. We don't agree 100% on everything, but as far as I'm concerned the implementation of his idea is no longer Deeply Stupid, or even Shallowly Stupid. It has evolved nicely, and should continue to do so.

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So there's this effort underway, apparently, to promote Perl: the Iron Man project or movement or revolution or somesuch. To quote my Beloved, they mean well; they try hard; they fail dismally.

Here's why they're stupid.

The blog is ugly. The font is some Times New Roman variant (maybe actually Times New Roman) with a weird line height and possibly something insane done with the kerning, so it's hard to read. Never mind tl;dr - this is tu;dr: Too Ugly; Didn't Read.

He's got ten footnotes in the entry and no internal links. You scroll down to find the number, then back up to find where you were up to. MightyGodKing has an excellent footnoting system, where you can click to follow and click to go back, or just hover over the footnote to see its text in a little box. Why not use something like that? Hypertext has been part of HTML since Sir Tim invented it; did nobody mention this?

There are no links to other sites. He mentions all sorts, and doesn't link to them. He doesn't even have a mailto: link on the project's email address.

There's no way to comment. I'm posting my response here because the author, whoever he is, makes no attempt to be contactable. That's not a blog. Blogs are interactive; his website claims to be a blog, but it's just a braindump.

There are no pictures or images, apart from a pointless flash animation at the top. Again, HTML got the IMG tag quite some time back: could someone find this guy's personal email address and let him know that?

Finally, there's the small matter of the name: Iron Man. The best Perl programmer I know is Skud, damned_colonial. I've met her in person, and I've read her discussions of piercings and PMS, so I'm willing to make a fairly confident guess as to her gender. I don't think "Iron Man" is a title likely to make her feel included. And if you don't have Skud, you're not talking about Perl; you're just writing BrainFuck with extra punctuation.

So, in short: Perl Advocacy: Ur Doin It RONG.

Is there any wonder everyone says the language is dying if this is all they can muster for publicity?