We knew it had to come to this, eventually.

The Ruby on Rails gang had moved in first, fueled and aided by the bloggers who had realized that Ruby was new and cool and from Japan and all that.

They were quick to enter, and had a lot of flashy Gang 2.0 signs. Wearing lots of pastels and dynamic details, they were able to woo the crowd. Yes, this is what gang war had come to in the post-dot-com era.

Of course, the Javascript gang didn’t take too kindly to that, screaming “Long Live DHTML ”. They squared off a bit, until they realized that AJAX was just DHTML with another name. So the Ruby on Rails and the Javascripters form an alliance.

But Ravens Gate Pool was our pool, our turf. We had taken it in 1995, and helped set the standards for how all gangs would work. We alone had made interaction a household word. We alone had taken the pool from being just another boring place to hang out, to a place that everyone could enjoy.

So the Perl gang retook the pool. And we made it our own again.