in reply to The Black Art of Perl Programming?

Book stores stock books that they think they can sell. More people are buying Java books. There are many reasons for this, and not all of them are positives for Java. The bottom line though is that Java is currently a more popular language in the world at large, and if you're going to get upset every time you see evidence of that you're in for a rough ride.

If your complaint is that the Perl books look too practical and not fun enough (does "Enterprise Business Solutions with Java" sound fun?), then I'd say you're missing a major point in the Perl culture. Perl is about results, not about buzzwords. It isn't cool and it doesn't care. (By the way, there are books on graphics programming and web services with Perl coming out soon from O'Reilly.)

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Re: Re: The Black Art of Perl Programming?
by Anonymous Monk on Nov 18, 2002 at 22:08 UTC
    It isn't cool and it doesn't care.

    Why not care? Why shouldn't a language care about its image? Can't Perl be cool and get the job done? How about book titles like:

    Perl for E-commerce

    3D Graphic Programming with OpenGL, Renderman, and Perl.

    Game programming with Perl

    Mod_perl is tremendous tool for large e-commerce sites. But oh no, we have to have book titles like Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C, or the Mod_Perl Cookbook. Do you see what I mean?

    Ultimately, my point goes beyond image. My point is that obvious uses for Perl are not being marketed to the masses. And that's such a shame.

[reply]
      The sort of specialization you're citing here is something that you can do when you have a large market available. Perl's market may not be large enough to support entire books on these niche concerns.

      The only reason anyone needs a book on games in Java is because there's a demand for Java applet games. The number of people writing games or doing 3D graphics in Perl is tiny, so a publisher would probably not make any money on those books.

      The e-commerce book idea isn't bad. I don't think there's anything special about e-commerce (as opposed to other kinds of web apps), but I suppose it could be a sort of general web application book that uses examples from commerce situations.

      Of course the Java books I own may reveal why I'm not very insterested in sexy titles: Java in a Nutshell, Java Cookbook...

[reply]
      I find all of the suggested titles incredible boring, and I would have to surpress the urge to throw the book far away. And I really fail to see what's so exciting about "3D graphic programming with OpenGL, Renderman, and Perl" when "Writing Apache modules with Perl and C" doesn't do it for you. Both titles more or less have the same structure.

      To me it looks like you rather want different subjects, not just fancy titles.

      As for marketing Perl to the masses, no thanks. With the internet hype, Perl has attracted many new programmers, most of them of rather poor quality. I'd rather see them go.

      Abigail

[reply]

      Why shouldn't a language care about its image?

      To the best of my knowledge Perl has not yet become sentient and is thus unable to care about its image. :-)

[reply]

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