If Perl per se matters to you that much, then you should find some way to make it your day job.
Hmmm...isn't that sort of what were talking about? If there's no job market for Perl, that's kinda hard to do. Even if you run a business where Perl is embedded, there are challenges to using it if the marketplace shows resistance to it.
(At a previous employer who developed a web application written in Perl, they tried moving into a higher-end market with larger "enterprise" customers, and quickly faced the obstacle that most of these customers wanted something that plugged in to their Java environment and that their Java trained programmers could work on. Sure there are ways of addressing this, but the job gets harder.)
...start your own business...
As mentioned, I am.
I use Perl because it's useful for me.
Sounds like a good reason. :-)
It's why I started using Perl and why I will continue to do so, regardless of the popularity.
I imagine personal utility is the most important factor about Perl for a lot of people, an its viability as a career is irrelevant. That's perfectly fine. I only listed 2 reasons why popularity mattered, and fully expect for it not to matter to a lot of users.
Just because it was possible to be a full-time "Perl Developer" a few years ago does not mean that those market dynamics were stable or sustainable.
Absolutely.
On the one hand, you can say that the kinds of opportunities during the boom were a "natural state of affairs". Most people look at the boom as an abberation, especially in terms of hiring and staffing practices.
I'd lean towards aberration.
Accordingly I've often wondered if Perl really ever was commercially viable, and whether it was just a side effect of the demand exceeding the supply. It's a valid point and one that could suggest that without massive market changes, Perl isn't likely to ever recapture what it had.
But there's also a reason why Perl was the winner during that period. It wasn't designed to do CGI, but conveniently CGIs had requirements that were met by Perl better than anything else.
So what I'm trying to get to the bottom of, is how was the problem redefined (lots of obvious answers come to mind), and why did Perl stop being the ideal solution? (Or was it always viewed by non-Perl devotees as a highly imperfect solution, and thus the rapid migration away from it once alternatives became available?)
And, are there things that can be done today that might make Perl a better fit for the problems of today and the future?
It's easy to walk away from the situation and say Perl already is perfect for this niche or that, and it works perfectly fine for my own personal projects, but many of us know from experience that Perl is quite capable of scaling up and solving the grander problems and addressing mainstream needs.
With regards to advocacy, I've wasted more energy than I care to admit on "how to make Perl more popular". I've given up. Popularity is irrelevant. Doing cool stuff is what counts.
And...
Chris Devers wrote:
Advocacy *doesn't* work well.
I don't necessarily disagree. (I don't recall mentioning advocacy in my posting, although I commented on it in earlier posts.)
Advocacy is a form of marketing, and I'd dare say most of us aren't marketers. Being a programmer, I'm more interested in the situation from a product development perspective.
If Perl is loosing market share, one likely reason is that it is no longer addressing the needs of the market. What are the unmet needs that sends people to Java? Python? PHP?
I find these interesting questions, because they could be indicators of places where Perl is weak. Where it needs to grow.
I also fully accept that the community might reach the conclusion that to meet the needs of the, say Python community, Perl would have to do X, and that would be too un-Perl-like and damage elegance of Perl, making it not a worthwhile change.
But I have a feeling that a lot of the concerns can be addressed through things that are peripheral to the core language. For example, people at the last Boston.pm meeting scoffed when biran d foy mentioned P5EE, but perhaps it is that kind of "enterprise grade" support library that will expand Perl's already high dynamic range of problems that it can solve into the same space as J2EE.
I similarly think Bogart Salzberg (in his earlier posting here) raises some excellent points on where Perl poses obstacles to being a PHP alternative. They suggest that some glue and packaging might go a long way towards addressing those deficiencies. Very possible that any such solution will not gain popularity and it will make no difference in the long run towards changing Perl's popularity. But discussing the approaches to these projects and inspiring ourselves to pursue some of them is, I think, a step in the right direction.
-Tom
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