Bill Ricker wrote: > Three-part article by VM Brasseur @vmbrasseur > "The Rising Costs of Aging Perlers"
I guess this was worth writing down, but weren't we all aware that "the practitioners of Perl are aging and not enough junior developers are being created to sustain the language as a going concern?" Pretty much any Perl-related metric you look at will tell you this. In part 2: ...it does not appear as though the Perl community is doing much to correct this issue. As I detailed in my earlier post, in many cases Perl's new programmer outreach appears fairly crummy if not virtually non-existent. This needs to change before Perl starts to face a cultural extinction. This gives the impression like the #1 problem with Perl is the lack of outreach to new developers. Making sure new developers have a good experience is a useful way of reducing the friction of getting developers from junior to intermediate, and yes, if you do a really bad job at it, you'll turn some developers away (a quantity I expect amounts to a rounding error), but you have to look further up the marketing funnel to find the real problem. Developers need a compelling reason to investigate the language in the first place. That's not happening these days for both technical and perceptual reasons. Two of the three prescribed solutions in part 3 actually address the marketing problems, rather than the thesis from part 1, developer outreach. One was "make cool stuff and talk about it." This is a great idea, even if not novel. (The "Iron Man Blogging Challenge"[1] was one attempt at that.) But it is less clear how to encourage it to happen, other than simply spreading the word. The next suggestion is "Modernize our dilapidated online communities," specifically mentioning PerlMonks. Sounds good, and I'm sure some of that wouldn't hurt. But how do you make that happen? Who runs PerlMonks? (Apparently it was "was recently assimilated by The Perl Foundation.") It seems it is equally important to go to the new platforms where developers hang out now, like Stack Overflow. (You can find a link to the weekly "stackoverflow perl report"[2] in the Perl Weekly newsletter[3].) The third and final suggestion is for The Perl Foundation (TPF) to fund "training, outreach and community building." That's great, and if there are sponsors and volunteers interested in pursuing that, fantastic, but if I was allocating a limited budget of time and money to solving Perl's diminishing relevance, there are higher priority, big picture issues to be addressed. Maybe my assumptions are wrong, but I'd like to see the stats that show that PHP, Python, and Ruby are still on growth trajectories because of their superior new developer outreach. It's an important supporting function, but it isn't why developers show up at your door. As the effective figurehead of the Perl community, I feel only TPF is in a position to make the sort of changes necessary to drag Perl back into relevance and to allow it to grow and thrive, and these changes are not predominantly technical in nature. I don't know if TPF is of the right structure to do the job. Perl needs some strong leadership from someone who has a vision for a future of the language, a strong desire to see it become relevant again, a willingness to tick off the old-school developers who cling to the 1990s way of doing things, and the persuasion skills to bring them on board. Who leads TPF? (You can answer that here[4].) I've been aware of the people who have lead Perl releases, but I can't say TPF leadership has been all that visible (I don't read P5P; maybe it is there). It's built from layers of committees, that all report to another committee, known as the board, which has a chairman, but it seems designed to diffuse power. That's a good model if you want to keep cruising with the status quo. Not so great if you need to make significant changes. I wonder if a structure modeled after Debian would work better. I'd like to see a Perl leader who either has or hires product management expertise. They need to be able to examine Perl as a product, compare it to the other languages operating in the same space, understand why users are choosing them over Perl, and use that to inform a road map - whether that be making Perl better at what those other languages do, or finding a new killer application for Perl. (This approach was discussed years ago on the Enlightened Perl marketing list.) Then there's the whole Perl 6 issue... I haven't read a fraction of what's been said about the impact Perl 6 has had on the brand, so I'll refrain from commenting, as it is likely to be redundant. -Tom 1. http://www.enlightenedperl.org/ironman.html 2. http://bit.ly/1369hWo 3. http://perlweekly.com/ 4. http://www.perlfoundation.org/who_s_who -- Tom Metro Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA "Enterprise solutions through open source." Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/ _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
