Hi Johan, On Thu, 31 Jan 2013 09:10:47 +0100 Johan Vromans <[email protected]> wrote:
> http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/01/29/0235220/perls-glory-days-are-behind-it-but-it-isnt-going-anywhere > > We know we suck at marketing, but is there anything we are going to do > about it? > I now have something more to add. Recently I've done some small (but important) tweaks to http://perl-begin.org/ to make the intent of it clearer, and to avoid some what I perceived as pointless marketing-speak. People should now be able to use it to learn Perl immediately and effectively, without all the advocacy speak. As I noted on #perl , I suspect that part of the reason most people still prefer jQuery ( http://jquery.com/ - the “write less, do more” JS library) instead of Angular JS ( http://angularjs.org/ - the “Superheroic JavaScript MVW Framework”) is because jQuery’s motto tells you why you would want to use it, while Angular JS uses hyperbolic adjectives (“Superheroic” - bleh). As Mark Twain notes in http://palc.sd40.bc.ca/palc/Archive/writingtips/twainadjectives.htm : <<<<< When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them—then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice >>>>> I really liked the old http://www.cpan.org/ motto of “stop reinventing wheels - start building spaceships” because it uses a good analogy from something more tangible than software, for the philosophy behind CPAN. Many people now feel that Perl 5 and perl 5 are almost useless without the ability to use external CPAN modules, and we at #perl on Freenode have been suffering a lot of heat from people who want to use Perl without it. That put aside, I think that making some CPAN distributions and packages have less dependencies, faster to load (Moo instead of Moose, etc.), and less intimidating will be a good thing. One of the criticisms I heard about the Ruby and Ruby gems culture is that “everything is a framework” and that “a simple script to move files. 100 MB of RAM”. In any case, I suggest we promote Perl simply by hacking: improving existing CPAN distributions and other applications, creating new ones that we lack (like CMSes, etc.), and not worry too much about whether or not Perl is the hippest/most-in-vogue/coolest/"OMG-Ponies!!!"/etc. language, because hip and fashions come and go (HTML -> Dynamic HTML -> Web 2.0 -> HTML 5 anyone?). A lot of people have been criticising languages like C and C++ all the time with all sorts of criticisms, but both are popular among open-source developers, and still used in production a lot[C++] and often are the best choice. Perl has some advantages over Ruby or Python or JavaScript or CoffeeScript or whatever, even in the core language (to say nothing about CPAN), and I find that Ruby or Python's implicit scoping cause too many problems and are unpredictable, which is why I normally still prefer using Perl 5. So stop worrying, because eventually anti-something hype or propaganda is getting old, and people use common sense and logic to criticise it, and they eventually don't buy it even if the media keeps parroting the same something. Like we say in Hebrew, “the lie does not have legs”. Even if the television or mainstream media is broadcasting non-stop propaganda, most of the people who matter will rather buy into stuff they see on the Internet, even if it seems completely irrelevant or even silly such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcat or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangnam_Style or whatever. Maybe I'm too naïve and optimistic (and have a positive view of life, humans, and the world), but I think that “truth” will eventually prevail, only that we must constantly seek better and more up-to-date “truth”s, because “existence exists” and is dynamic and there will never be a “Theory of Everything” or the “Omega” of human enlightenment. We must constantly seek it. I just hope that humanity or our planet does not perish in this course. [ Sorry for the flow of consciousness towards the end. ] Regards, Shlomi Fish {{{ [C++] - I personally feel that C++ gives me too much rope to hang myself, so in order to save me from myself, I prefer sticking to C, but it seems to work fine in projects such as Qt, KDE, or web browsers or whatever, where programmers are more clueful than I am, at least in this respect. }}} -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Perl Humour - http://perl-begin.org/humour/ The Spanish Inquisition does not expect Chuck Norris. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .
