[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Jon Orwant (lists.advocacy):
> >Ziggy then made some excellent points. My paraphrasing of one of them
> >is that nearly every Perl advocate is first and foremost a programmer.
> >Java has fans in every position of the corporate hierarchy, and some
> >people whose job is nothing more than to promote the language.
> >O'Reilly can, in a small way, provide some help promoting Perl.
>
> This is something I am no way going to deny. Programmers spread the word
> to programmers and corporations spread the word to corporations.
Simon, you may have hit upon a huge chunk of the advocacy issue here.
We're all programmers, but there are a very large number of Perl users
who don't identify themselves as programmers, just occasional Perl users.
How many "occasional Java" users/programmers are there?
The whole Java meme says Java is winning for every Java programmer
hired and every product shipped written in Java. It doesn't matter
if no one use/buy JavaPoint or JavaOffice, so long as it shipped,
and shipped with a buzzword-compliant press release.
If I understand Larry's worldview correctly, Perl has failed if
we achieve world domination and everyone is running PerlOffice
or PerlPoint, but no one actually writes programs in Perl. Perl
is unique in that it was designed to favor solving today's problem
today over shipping product in three months. If Perl is used
to ship product, great, but it's better if every sysadmin in the
datacenter can write one perl program that is used only once to
put out a major fire. After all, this is one way we programmers
sell Perl to our peers.
The next question that comes to me is, "How do we turn the tables on
Java and refocus the conversation on Perl's Dark Matter -- Perl users
who don't identify with being programmers?" When those users are
added to the mix, I'm sure Perl is making more people more productive
every day than Java is.
Z.
