Let me translate for programming.reddit readers: There's a lot of hard-won, specialized human knowledge encoded in CPAN, but if you don't have a Perl hacker around you're doomed to reinvent it -- or, worse, to never even realize it was there.
(Okay, I confess that I've taken liberties with the original, which is not about computer languages at all, so you should all go read it. But I'm being serious: This really is the argument. And it's a pretty good argument, though it's a little stronger when applied to thousand-year-old human languages than to twenty-year-old computer languages.)
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 18.6 ms ] thread(Okay, I confess that I've taken liberties with the original, which is not about computer languages at all, so you should all go read it. But I'm being serious: This really is the argument. And it's a pretty good argument, though it's a little stronger when applied to thousand-year-old human languages than to twenty-year-old computer languages.)
For a more poetic take on the same thing listen to Wade Davis: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_...