Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote:
> Adam Turoff [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] quoth:
> *>
> *>As tom is fond of pointing out, and it's the UNIX CLI.
>
> But tom isn't marketing to the PHBs.
PHB's want out-of-the-box thinkers, and they want to buy
boxes (like IDEs). Tom's salesmanship of the CLI leaves
a lot to be desired, but the core point is valid. The fact
remains that a Perl hacker who knows his/her way around
a CLI is much more valuable to a PHB than someone who sits
all day twiddling an IDE.
*THIS* is what needs to be sold, not tom's phrasing of it.
If IDEs are the be-all and end-all of productivity, why do
we need expensive UNIX programmers and UNIX sysadmins in the first
place? What can they do that a room full of (cheaper) VB programmers
(offshore) can't do?
Or, rather, if we're so damn good, what images do we need to
promote to convince PHBs that a CLI-friendly Perl hacker is
an asset to his organization (with or without an IDE)?
> You miss the point completely in a country that is all about image
> marketing. The technical details could be argued ad nauseam but while the
> argument ensues someone else is smarter and markets their shiny happy
> product that looks cool.
Linux is all about technical details, and it's got a huge portion
of the image marketing down cold.
I don't care who did it or how it happened. It has been done before,
it can be done again.
> *>And if you prefer Sendmail to qmail, no problem! I think
> *>Sarathy is at USENIX talking about the Perl plugin for sendmail.
>
> This is the technical side, not the marketing side but certainly no less
> important.
I can't seem to parse that, Elaine.
Sendmail is pushing Sendmail as an enterprise marketing solution.
And now Perl can be used to enhance Sendmail. Looks like a marketing
win to me.
> *>> WTF does WAP compliant mean? :)
> *>See http://www.wapforum.org/
>
> Adam, I was being flip. "$foo compliant" is just a lot of marketing hooey
> because noone really knows what $foo is, but $foo compliant is warm and
> fuzzy and sounds good on paper. This is marketing, not reality.
Keep the patronizing tones to yourself. If you want to
advocate Perl, please start.
Yes, claiming that Perl is HTTP compliant is a waste of bandwidth.
WAP compliance isn't in the same boat, which you would realize if
you actually took the time to see 'WTF WAP compliance means'.
> *>Someone *is* saying 'show me the money', and someone at Sun is giving good demo.
>
> That's because someone at Sun _is paying attention_. Sell the idea and you
> don't actually have to produce something that works.
Remarks like this don't help Perl, Elaine.
I'm getting pretty tired of "Perl advocates" that are resigned to
accept the forgotten stepchild status Perl has compared to Java and
spend all of their time slinging mud at Java instead of promoting Perl.
Didn't we just finish saying how Paul Prescod trashed Perl to promote
Python, and how we'd never do the same thing to promote Perl? Maybe
I woke up in the wrong universe or something this morning...
> *>What does the Perl community do? Ship working code, skipping the demos
> *>and the marketing department in the process.
>
> The Perl community fights over nits [...]
The Perl community is quite happy to nurse as many internal squabbles
as it can bear, watching idly by as Perl gets adopted or displaced.
Suddenly, I wonder why Ilya stayed so long.
> *>Sounds like that would make a good tshirt, but wouldn't do a damn thing
> *>for PHBs who can't find PerlDirect yet insist it doesn't exist. Would
> *>do even less for PHBs who insist Perl is slow, and use C++ instead.
>
> :) But it would get their attention.
Look how much attention that nekkid man got for Beyond.com. Where are they now?
> Take the 7-up ad campaign for an
> example..brilliant as it is memorable. 7-up is a brand and so too could
> Perl as is Java if that's the way you want to go.
Now Perl Soda is a prerequisite for getting enterprise adoption
for Perl? Please.
Kim Polese said early on that she chose 'Java' as a name for the Oak
project because it was fun. It's important that a language like Perl,
Python or Java remove all of the drudgery we hate in C and C++, and they
all do that in varying degrees. Programming needs to be fun, and Perl
has rekindled the passion for programming with many geeks over the years.
Yes, the cool Perl tshirt of the month is very important, and it
is happening (http://www.thinkgeek.com/ and http://www.geekstuff.com/),
and that helps maintain and extend Perl's brand awareness. But that's
still selling Perl to the programmers and middle managers, not the
executives that dictate "all programming is to be done in (VB|Java)".
> *>The problem isn't reminding people that Perl exists.
>
> EMC ran an full page ad in last Sunday's Boston Globe and the border of
> the ad listed a number of technologies including Java, VBscript, PHP, sh,
> awk...Perl was not among them. Yes, they need to be reminded.
And how many full page ads are out there that don't list Java? All
you've shown is that EMC doesn't care for Perl.
I forget who did the survey at TPC3, but one year ago there were more
want ads for Perl programmers than there were for COBOL or C++ programmers,
and it looked like Perl want ads were growing faster than Java want ads.
PHBs know about Perl.
Occasionally they think it's slow, unreliable and not ready for prime time.
This is what we need to fix.
Z.
