Bill Ricker wrote:
@perlfoundation <http://twitter.com/perlfoundation> Two reviews of the
Perl presence at CeBit - http://bit.ly/aS2EDH, http://bit.ly/aEy3Xx Sounds
successful.
Do we want to do something at the LinuxCon in South Boston in August ?
I read one of the reviews and it sounds like it worked out well for
them, but I'm not entirely sure what the message should be about Perl
these days. I've been following some of the discussion on the
Enlightened Perl Organisation (http://www.enlightenedperl.org/) announce
list, and recently joined the marketing list. There's certainly
enthusiasm for promoting Perl, but it isn't clear that we (as a group)
can articulate clear and compelling reasons for using Perl.
The CeBit approach seemed to be to answer whatever random questions that
came up, and to show off demos of a few projects. While that doesn't
hurt the situation, a more organized and intentional approach might do
better.
Doing it better, though, isn't trivial. It would take some research and
work to first understand the reasons why developers have left Perl, the
impression they have of Perl, and their concerns over using it on a work
project. (Of course we can all speculate and guess at the answers to
these, but there's danger in doing so from within the community, as
those that have stuck with Perl have obviously not considered the
deficiencies significant enough to justify abandoning the language.)
Once you understand the "customer perspective" better, you can then
address it with all the marketing techniques that engineers hate, but
are still effective on us: case studies (big names that still use Perl),
statistics (CPAN modules, number of Perl jobs/programmers), feature
comparisons (Perl vs. Python vs. Ruby), specific demos showing how to
solve a common problem more effectively with Perl, talking points, etc.
-Tom
--
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/
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