RE: [Boston.pm] Bottom Up
Can someone remind me why Perl needs to be more popular? What actual problem will be solved? Are we running low on module developers? Running low on core developers? Is the existing code-base evaporating? Are there not enough t-shirt and book sales? How will we know when Perl is popular enough? Wouldn't it be easier to just trash the reputations of other languages? Should we have existing Perl users use Perl more often? I think your target audience is a little skewed from the original threads purpose. I don't recall anyone claiming that their are not enough programmers. I believe the problem was not enough unknowledgable, perl-accepting decision makers. It doesn't need to be more popular though. Nor does it need to be accepted by non-technical decision makers. These are not necessities. I just really liked programming in Perl for all those years, but since having a job means more to me than being able to choose which language I use in my job, I am now a C# programmer. This because perl was not popular enough to be supported by my non-technical and technical managers. I'm not complaining about learning a new language, I just really liked perl. It's almost like being laid off from a corporation because not enough customers wanted to purchase their product. So it is that I am no longer a perl programmer (defined by the language I use 50 hours a week as opposed to the language I use 5 hours a week on side projects). I am confident that, had perl more acceptance by those not in the know, the decision would have been made differently. And it's like they had to choose between the two languages as all of our legacy code is written in perl. Almost everything in-house is. It still did not prevent them from deciding that Perl was not supported enough to continue using it. How will we know when Perl is popular enough? Oooh.. this ones easy. When my boss comes to me and says use Perl for this next project. I wouldn't ask for more perl popularity than that. I hope I made the problem at hand more clear. -John ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Bottom Up
5. Clean up CPAN. The egalitarian nature of CPAN is commendable. However, quality and activity vary widely and redundancy is rampant. A baitPerhaps we should require people to hold certifications before they contribute code./ You are right about CPAN. CPAN's hugeness and uneven quality is intimidating -- I can't learn Perl! Look at all the modules I have to know how to use! -- and impenetrable -- How can I know if Bob's brand new version 0.03 module is better than Joe's 3-year old version 9.72 module? I see this problem as insoluble, but it'd be great if someone solved it anyway. My beef with CPAN is the fact that there is some administrative work involved with writing a perl program that uses a CPAN module. After I write it, I can't email it to a perl neophyte and say here, run this. Instead, I have to say first you need to get an admin to install a bunch of modules. Once I get to the word admin, I get laughed at. Is there a CPAN distribution just as there are Linux distributions? In other words, a collection of CPAN modules that one can install as a bundle rather than having to use the perl -MCPAN install module_that_wont_compile? ActiveState provides PPM which take a lot of pain out of CPAN since so much stuff just doesn't compile on Windows, but modules that don't compile are simply excluded from the PPM database. Also, some Linux distributions have packages that bundle a bunch of perl modules together, unfortunately, they only work with that Linux distro. I would prefer a standard distribution of modules for all platforms beyond the limited stuff that comes with the perl install. -- , , , | Duane Bronson /|/|/| , | [EMAIL PROTECTED] ( ( ( |/| | http://www.nerdlogic.com/ \( | | 453 Washington St. #4A, Boston, MA 02111 |/| (617) 515-2909 ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Bottom Up
hi ( 05.03.01 14:21 -0500 ) Greg London: What if O'Reilley (or someone) set up a website that did free (or low cost) online certification? what if you did that. What it requires is a community spirit, and a little bit of generousity from its members to grant it the possibility of being. i don't think so. what it requires is for somebody to *do the work*. as you've found out, this [and other] topics can generate a lot of postings to an email list. but you won't get any closer to your holy grail of perl certification without somebody actually doing something besides posting to an email list. -- \js oblique strategy: openly resist change ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Bottom Up
John Saylor said: hi ( 05.03.01 14:21 -0500 ) Greg London: What if O'Reilley (or someone) set up a website that did free (or low cost) online certification? what if you did that. brilliant. Rather than focus on the goal, shift focus on how impossible it appears to get there. never mind that the Bazaar model might actually produce an answer that you never thought of. Just kill the conversation. Obstruct it. confound it. get it off the list. Turn it into a cathedral model. require that the person asking the question also provide the answer. don't allow discussion. Demand the individual do the work themselves. don't allow the bazaar to produce a result you can't control. strategy: openly resist change yeah, I get that about you. Did I mention I'm done trying to move the unmovable? Lead, follow, or get out of the way. Cause all you're doing right now is obstructing. ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Bottom Up
hi ( 05.03.01 14:21 -0500 ) Greg London: What if O'Reilley (or someone) set up a website that did free (or low cost) online certification? John Saylor said: what if you did that. ( 05.03.01 15:59 -0500 ) Greg London: brilliant. Rather than focus on the goal, shift focus on how impossible it appears to get there. i'm sorry but you appear to be of your mind. i thought that *was* the goal [for you], certification. i'm not saying anything's impossible, i'm just tired of hearing you gripe about the fact that not everyone sees things the same way you do. i think we can both agree that perl certification won't get done on the boston.pm mailing list. all i'm saying is stop complaining and *do* something about it beside try to convince people on this list that you are 'correct'. and i think you've completely misread the cathedral and the bazaar. have you ever heard, 'release early and often'? well, i was saying release something. strategy: openly resist change yeah, I get that about you. btw- they are OBLIQUE strategies, from brian eno. Cause all you're doing right now is obstructing. all you're doing is whining. and all we're doing is calling each other names on a public mailing list. see, we have something in common after all ... -- \js oblique strategy: adding on ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Bottom Up
John Saylor wrote: ( 05.03.01 14:21 -0500 ) Greg London: What if O'Reilley (or someone) set up a website that did free (or low cost) online certification? John Saylor said: what if you did that. ( 05.03.01 15:59 -0500 ) Greg London: brilliant. Rather than focus on the goal, shift focus on how impossible it appears to get there. i'm sorry but you appear to be of your mind. i thought that *was* the goal [for you], certification. i'm not saying anything's impossible, i'm just tired of hearing you gripe about the fact that not everyone sees things the same way you do. certification is the goal. I don't know how to get there. I thought maybe some folks on the list might be able to come up with an answer if we put our heads together and brainstorm. My only gripe is that it never gets to that point of an actual brainstorm. Instead, some people feel the need to bring up socialists and fractured communities, and now your demand that I do it myself (dont ask, just do it), before an actual brainstorming bazaar can occur. My question is what if someone provided certification that was free to programmers but caused the corporate world to adopt perl? I never claimed to have the answer. I was asking the list an open ended question. Must you stand in the way of some people even having a simple conversation about it? This list is boiling down to the lowest common denominator. Unless everyone agrees to allow the conversation, a single person can obstruct the whole thing. ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Bottom Up
Sean Quinlan said: OK. Please bear with me as I think while I type (brainstorm). How many under-employed Perl Mongers do we have in the Boston area who would be willing to semi-volunteer? Suggestions? Would anyone be interested in participating in this? I did three in-house training courses at my current job. It was basic perl for non-perl programmers. They were two-hour sesssions, once a week for 7 weeks. about 20 students per class. After that, I wrote Impatient Perl as an attempt to create a teach-yourself-perl-in-N-days book. It's about 130 pages long. Still an intro to perl, but takes the student/reader all teh way to object oriented programming and advanced regular expressions. It's licensed GNU-FDL, with the idea that while it might not be perfect, it should be a good place to start. I never broke the book into training sessions, so I'm not sure how long a course would be, but I wrote it as a text book of sorts, so it should break into a course fairly well. I could teach a course if it were in the evening or something. Not sure how I could work it into the 9-5 routine since I'm working full time. That's what I've got. Greg -- Hungry for a good read? Crave science fiction? Get a taste of Hunger Pangs by Greg London. http://www.greglondon.com/hunger/ ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] Bottom Up
Greg London said: After that, I wrote Impatient Perl as an attempt to create a teach-yourself-perl-in-N-days book. It's about 130 pages long. Still an intro to perl, but takes the student/reader all teh way to object oriented programming and advanced regular expressions. It's licensed GNU-FDL, with the idea that while it might not be perfect, it should be a good place to start. I've been thinking that maybe this would be better served if I put it on a wiki or something that allowed people to add corrections and improvements. But I have no idea how a wiki works or how I would convert one large Open Office document into a wiki, and then how to convert it back to Open Office again. The point of that being to be able to upload the changes to Lulu and offer a book version of the document. Can a wiki keep track of changes, and undo some and keep others? Anyway, it was intended to be a one-stop-shopping for someone who wanted to learn perl from zero. i.e. this would get you up and running to the point that you understood all the basic concepts of perl. It doesn't go into web programming or anything like that, it's all generic perl that pretty much anyone could use. ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
[Boston.pm] Bottom Up
An (improved) argument for a bottom-up approach to boosting Perl... A bottom-up approach does not directly address the issue at hand, Perl's reputation among important decision-makers. But as an indirect factor it may be more effective than the top-down buzz of a Perl Inside marketing campaign. The popularity of PHP, for example, was built from scratch on bottom-up buzz. It had so little hope of ever being widely used that its creator named it Personal Home Pages. But it caught fire for two reasons: 1) it's friendly to newbies, and 2) it's web-centric. (And hosting providers supported it, as Ben pointed out). When you've got a lot of wide-eyed, excited newbies giggling over their first sticky widget, you might not have much talent but you've got tons of buzz. When you also consider that the World Wide Web was simultaneously the subject and medium of this buzz, it becomes hyper-buzz. The newbies turned into real programmers, started real business and made real money. And now PHP is taken seriously by the PHB in the corner office. No one had to advertise PHP. The environment was simply saturated with buzz about it. How can Perl get buzz? Get newbies. This won't help Perl in the short run, but it will be vital in the long run to breed a new generation of Perl hackers, and could provide a solid boost to Perl's reputation within a few years. How can Perl get newbies? Others have pointed out that Perl is not the typical academic language. That's why I would propose targeting not the CS students but the vast superset of computer users. Realistically, only a small portion would be interested in evolving into power users. But for this portion (still huge in absolute terms), the ubiquitous utility of Perl is only a few lessons away. So here's a few carrots for those kids: 1. Make Perl easier to find. The Unix core of Mac OS X is a HUGE opportunity for Perl to be introduced to a new, and growing, community of users. But most Mac users ignore the Terminal, even those with the aptitude to quickly learn how to use it. A free light-weight Cocoa wrapper around Perl could tip the balance. Rather than a full-blown IDE, it would be a text editor that mediated the input, execution and output of the script, changed mode transparently, etc. 2. Make Perl easier to learn. In terms of utility and usability, php.net outshines any perl reference site. By a lot. Even without the type of GUI proposed above, a high-quality online Perl reference would help. 3. Make Perl CGI easier to use. The aid of CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser) should be built-in and ON by default. (How hard is it for perl to figure out that it was called in a CGI context and prepend a header upon expiring? For that matter, how hard is it for Apache to do?) 500 Server Error is NOT helpful. Sure, you could check the error log. But some ISPs don't even allow access to the error log. When you're smart enough to turn it OFF, you'll be smart enough to turn it OFF. 4. Make Perl fun. Celebrate the elements of sport and humor latent in Perl (or Perl hackers, anyway). Perl puzzles. Perl duels. The Obfuscated Perl Contest is a great example. 5. Clean up CPAN. The egalitarian nature of CPAN is commendable. However, quality and activity vary widely and redundancy is rampant. A little moderation could tidy it up a bit without ruffling too many feathers. How about a distinction for the most downloaded modules in each class? Sort by number. 6. Add features. PHP is certainly obese, but Perl never pretended to be a Spartan, either. How about pulling some of the most widely used and most stable module features into the perl executable? PHP has a major convenience edge over Perl. When you're a newbie, convenience trumps performance. Perhaps some of these new features could be flagged at compilation. -Bogart ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
