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Comment by cturner | Hacker News Reader

    where btw is A NICE HIP FEMALE PHRASE I COULD PRINT
    ON A SHIRT?

I'm a vim ballerina!

    "we" are literally invisible to the bigger public, not
    matter how much CPAN grows and no matter how much #perl
    is the biggest IRC channel on freenode.

Secret societies are cool.

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I don't see why females can't be ninjas and rockstars, or are these things just not as appealing to the "fairer sex"?

I thought this part of the essay was strange, because they sure as hell can be. Courtney Love, Brody Dalle, Joan Jett.

Not to mention: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunoichi

I don't know, but being a "Perl rockstar" would probably evoke a more "prog rock" feel, not exactly the best target if you aim for sex appeal.

(NB: I do like both Perl and prog rock, so I personally wouldn't have problems with that.)

Here's an idea -> bring visitors to the perl.org front-page directly to #perl freenode channel, via a JS IRC client.

Let them speak directly with core users from the very start.

Nice idea, but what tends to happen is this:

    -- User1235 has joined #perl --
    user1235> PERL SUCKS 111!!!11!!1!!11!!
    -- Chanserv set mode +o mst --
    -- user1235 was kicked ( troll ) --

The people who are honestly interested tend not to need the door shown to them, and people who aren't interested can't be convinced by such tactics.

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