Matt Trout just made a blogpost announcing the Iron Man Competition, sponsored by the Englightened Perl Organization.

I personally think this is a very good idea and a great way to tackle one of Perl's problem of today: perception. The language and its community may well be alive (Tim Bunce did a great job proving this), but few people outside the echo chamber know about it, and constantly make claims that Perl is dead. As Schwern very well put it in one of his talks, this perception issue is far from harmless and should not be taken lightly.

Given that today's communication routes among the newer generations are mainly blogs, Matt's proposal to "make noise" by blogging (as opposed to just writing excellent code, which should be enough) is the right way to help increase Perl awareness in the programming community.

I have been playing with the idea of starting a blog myself for a while. This might have been the push I needed to make up my mind and JFDI.

Note: This is a repost of a meditation of mine in PerlMonks. I am hoping that it counts as my first Iron Man blog entry.