[P5P removed from distro list...]
> So, how did Perl get this 'bad rap' and what sorts of things
I'm sure it varies from industry to industry, but in web design Perl got the
bad rap because to begin with there was an awful lot of bad Perl (Perl4,
much of it) being produced. Of course it wasn't bad because it was Perl, it
was bad because it was being written by a 19yr old in a company with no
capital, no experience, and an impossible deadline to meet.
After that, circa 1996 or so, there were alot of managers scratching their
heads at the tangle of poor Perl code now the 19yr old had left the company
and saying 'Boy, Perl sure didn't work out well in the long term - we need
to switch to something a bit less hairy'.
In my experience what doesn't work is telling people about Perl the language
and how it's really just as good if not better than the other languages. The
people calling the shots aren't programmers - they are working on inference.
Alot of people used Perl once, alot of people got left with a mess on their
hands, therefore all those who use Perl will get left with a mess on their
hands. This is by no means an unreasonable attitude in the abscence of more
information.
What we need, I think, is to reach the people in management making the
decisions. These are people who do not go to www.perl.com They do go to
trade shows and they do read (glance at) direct mail. I was at Internet
World in London the other day and all the content management systems
(vignette, mediasurface etc) have nice little glossy pages showing how some
web site works wonders with their product. We should have no trouble finding
such studies for Perl - the problem is that Perl doesn't ever have a stand
at the trade fairs.
Would it be possible for local Monger groups to provide staff and input to
attend trade fairs if capital were available to pay for the stand and the
printing costs of basic glossies? Can capital be found?
Maybe Perl friendly companies would agree to have a local pm member on their
stand to explain the virtues of Perl to any people who happened to show an
interest in the technology the company used?
I don't think we are short of good things to say about Perl and good ways to
say it - it's just difficult to reach the right people without spending
money.
I notice that some of these fairs are doing NPO discounts (Debian recently
managed to get a discounted stand at a Linux fair), maybe this is something
to pursue.
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