Hi,
I am the Product Marketing Manager for Perl books at O'Reilly & Associates.
Some of you may not know this, but I have been working on a project for the
last 6 months called Perl Success Stories. I have been collecting these
stories and posting them on our Perl web site. I am hoping to "to reach the
people in management making the decisions", but as you say, that is not an
easy task. Your point about "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", is well taken. I hear this all the
time. Ultimately, I would like to do a direct mail piece (possibly a
booklet of the Perl Success Stories) targeted at people in the management
level.
Advocating the use of Perl is my number one priority (which of course sells
our books
:-)). I would love to have someone from perlmongers in our booth at trade
shows! I may even be able to get my hands on some funds to produce the
"glossies" you're referring to.
Our Perl Conference 4.0 is coming up in July and would seem to be the
perfect place to begin. O'Reilly is a major sponsor of the cash prizes for
the White Camel Awards, so I think you can believe that we are serious in
promoting the use of Perl.
We should talk.
Betsy Waliszewski
707-829-0515 ext 362
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
At 05:27 PM 5/25/00 +0100, Peterson, Jonathan wrote:
>[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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