The document discusses that most Perl programmers are not elite or advanced users who attend conferences or follow the latest news and trends. It notes that these less experienced programmers "don't know what they don't know" and provides examples of common misconceptions around topics like time zones and Perl syntax. The author suggests creating a Perl Community Outreach Team to help address knowledge gaps and improve documentation by engaging with less experienced programmers respectfully. This could help both the individual programmers and strengthen the Perl community overall.

1. The Kingdom
of the Blind

2. You are all
elite Perl
programmers

3. You go to
Perl
conferences

4. You are
members of
the Perl
community

5. Most Perl
programmers
aren't

6. They don't
follow Perl
news

7. They don't
read Perl
blogs

8. They don't
buy Perl
books

9. They don't
join Perl
Mongers

10. They don't
call
themselves
Perl
programmers

11. They are
programmers
who use Perl

12. Talking to
these people
is interesting

13. They don't
know what
they don't
know

14. LinkedIn

15. Perl Groups

16. Perl
Perl Developers
Perl Mongers

17. “In the
kingdom of
the blind...”

18. “... the
one-eyed
man is king”

19. So much
misinformation

20. So many
outdated
practices

21. Web apps

22. Matt Wright's
CGI parser

23. Raw HTML in
strings

24. Advanced
programmers
use CGI.pm
HTML
generation

25. One bad
example
(not Perl specific)

26. Time zones

27. “There are
24 time
zones”

28. (actually there are 40)

29. “Time zones
all differ by
one hour”

30. (Venezuela: UTC-04:30
Iran: UTC+03:30
Nepal: UTC+05:45
and others)

31. “The UK uses
UTC”

32. (True – apart from the seven
months a year when we use British
Summer Time)

33. Perl
examples

34. “eq” is used
to assign a
string

35. You can't open
a file unless
you use
readdir() first

36. Stack
Overflow

37. Guess the
problem

38. “Perl thinks
my two
strings are
the same”

39. 'foo' eq 'bar'

40. Ah yes, and you
are the first
person to have
noticed this bug
since 1987. Sure.
(Klortho #11943)

41. People lack
most basic
programming
skill

42. RTFM

43. A
suggestion

44. Perl
Community
Outreach
Team

45. Get out of
the echo
chamber

46. Take a
holiday in
the Kingdom
of the Blind

47. Help people
to improve
their Perl

48. (But do it
gently,
please)

49. Bonus side
effect

50. See how
other people
use Perl

51. See what
confuses
them

52. See what
docs can be
improved

53. Help the Perl
community to
improve
information

54. Everybody
wins

55. (Except,
perhaps,
your sanity)

56. Join me in
the Kingdom
of the Blind

57. Easy way to
make a
difference

58. See you on
LinkedIn

59. Dave Cross
dave@perlhacks.com
@davorg