OldOneEye

Thanks for sharing your experience.

I worked some years with Perl, and while it was fun most of the time, it had a lot of frustrating things that made it difficult to have consistent builds and dependency management. The "There's more than one way to do it" mantra is very damaging when all you want is a productive language to produce something, vs having fun implementing or tinkering with libraries in CPAN. There's a lot of research, including taking a look at the code to really know what the library does, to assemble programs in Perl.

Once you get over the initial conceptual barrier and remember how the sigils are used, and get used to the bless object system, it is fun to develop in it, on an intellectual level. But rather annoying on an "enterprise" level.

In the end, I find it very difficult to justify using Perl over almost any other language. Even PHP would be better for dev teams, due to the higher focus on productivity frameworks, even if the language holds no distinctive advantage over any other. I felt Perl is not really a professional language, but the product of a whimsical creator and community (which, by the way, is very welcoming and open).

I find it unfair to call it moaning as is if its a childish reaction. Most of my friends can no longer afford to live in the city itself with their non-IT jobs. The gentrification process is a real thing happening right now with very real consequences.

I guess that MWC is not the problem per se. And it is part of the reason of the exploding international presence at least in the IT sector. But it is part of the problem of the worsening in the quality of life for many people.

My argument is that much of the wealth generated by tourism doesn't necessarily benefit citizens of Barcelona. I'm sure a lot of people are getting a lot of benefits, but I'm not sure it is the people that need it the most.

Really, I'm all for responsible tourism. Tourism is very good for the local economy when it is done properly. But it must come with regulation to avoid encouraging foreign companies (or local, doesn't matter) buying all houses/apartments and then renting them mainly to tourists for a much higher price than locals can pay. Since Barcelona hosts a very high volume of tourists, they can afford to do this almost the whole year.

Please understand, I'm not complaining about tourists (although they come with their own problems, like a 24/7 unwelcome festive ambient in residential neighborhoods...), I'm complaining on how Barcelona is not able to absorb that massive amount of tourism and how it makes lives miserable for local residents, that are pushed out of the city because it is far more beneficial to land-owners to rent to tourists, and how restaurants/shops push prices up too, and how the center of the city is no longer targeted towards locals. And much of the city center's businesses are no longer locally-owned and bring outside supply chains and may employ non local people, so it is not even that beneficial to the community as a whole.

Yes, jobs are created, but tourism-related jobs are not famous for their ability for employees to be able to live in the city itself.

I know this is a local politics problems, one of electing people that will do the right thing, but it's not that easy unfortunately, since voting in spain is very polarized on ideological and tribal feelings. And meanwhile, locals will just suffer the negative aspect of all this while benefiting little.

While I feel sorry for the people that put the energy to make this happen and also for the people that may lose their jobs this month over this, as a native inhabitant of Barcelona, I can only celebrate the news, even if it is for this terrible reason.

When MWC is ocurring in Barcelona, public transport (subway) goes on strike (because of the maximum impact). But usually this only fucks over non MWC attending people, because tickets are so expensive that only people which can use a taxi anyway will go, greatly diminishing the impact of the strike for attendants while making inhabitants lives miserable for that time period.

Also, Barcelona already has a very severe problem of houses being rented out to tourists with very high markups, producing a gentrification of the city (along with other factors, not only the tourism is responsible for this). Events like MWC do not help this situation.

BCN is already overloaded with tourism, events like MWC only make it worse for those of us that live there.

I'm completely aware that this is not the responsibility of MWC organization or tourists, this is a regulation problem. But since regulation is stacked against us, I can only get happier that this year we won't have to suffer all the inconvenience of the event while reaping almost none of the benefit.