Most of the discussion underway concerns advocacy/publicity in the
corporation, but I feel there is another place as or more important - the
schools.
I would venture that most of the commercial Perl developer base works for
one of two types of companies; this is probably a stupid generalization,
but anyway:
1) The large corporations who began using Perl for their
intranet/Internet sites. It gradually seeped down the application tiers to
be used as a powerful DB layer, and everywhere else from there.
2) The more recent dot-com boom has created lots of Internet-centric
jobs, where Perl has been a natural fit.
In the past few years, I have seen one of the driving forces behind trends
away from Perl to be developers coming right out of school. Does anybody
know of a place where Perl is taught formally? The CS progams I am
familiar with dwell almost entirely on Java, C++, and VB in more
GUI-related subjects. The programmers coming from these environments are
quick to criticize the use of anything that doesn't fit a strict OO view
of the universe, often to the point of convincing management if only for
the insistence of the zealous hires. In many of these cases, the result
has been lesser results and greater regrets; this is rarely attributed to
the choice of language, however, and more often to an incompatibility or
timeline issue. Which begs the question, of course.
Does anyone have good ideas on how to go about encouraging Perl study in
schools?
One more tidbit; there's been a lot of talk recently about poor advocacy,
and being "tolerant" developers. I'm in agreement with that attitude;
learn other languages, grow to understand the benefits of various syntaxes
and environments and models. But we can still be vocal about the
tremendous benefits of Perl, which, in my experience, nothing (yet)
compares to when it comes down to the core ease and flexility of the
language. So, stick up for Perl. In truth, the best thing Perl folks can
do in learning many languages is understanding what makes Perl a better
platform for so much of what we do, and a lot of what we don't do.
Dan
