Recent mental meanderings:

Lately I have been despairing that Perl 6 will ever happen. Or at least not happen in time to be useful. I don't really follow perl6-language very closely anymore. I was very excited for the first couple of years, but how long can a person be expected to remain enthusiastic? I still think Perl has huge potential. But will Perl 6 take so long that other languages will have eclipsed the value of the changes and new features? I'm just a code grunt without enough time to keep up with the latest in language theory or industry trend.

A lot of my worry is fueled by the dearth of programming jobs I've found with Perl as a significant component. Particularly for web systems where PHP seems to be rapidly outgrowing Perl. I love working in Perl, and am reluctant to look for real work in another language. How long will be too long though? Will we need a new name by the time Perl 6 is ready (and I am still assuming it will be completed some day) so that it isn't getting written off as some last gasp of a language that has already become passe?

I found a link to an article today that both gave me hope and increased my worry. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html I've observed a bit of this myself at work. If a stable Perl 6 gets out the door in time and is as good as it's sounds like it will be, how to we we increase the ... buzz? :) How do we, as a community, take advantage of that (and more) to drive Perl as a premier choice for developing web/distributed applications? How do we make it so that when HR/managers think LAMP, they assume Perl instead of PHP?

A stable version of mod_perl for Apache 2 seems incredibly important. Efforts like Class::DBI also seem to provide incredible potential; yet so few people out there even know it exists, including developers I know who work with Perl daily in their jobs! I think Perl is already superior to PHP, at least in most ways; where is PHP getting more traction than Perl from?

Sorry this is such a ramble. It's just my thoughts and concerns, for whatever they may be worth. I love Perl and am lazy enough not to want to switch to something new ... at least until I find something even better. So I find myself wondering what can we do to get other people to understand what most of use believe? Where can we make Perl even better for web apps, a space we still have a fair foothold in?

What are other open source (and not?) projects doing to get 'media' time that we aren't? ... Can anyone suggest a good primer on writing tech articles? Many, if not most of us have worked on cool projects, or used Perl in key systems at work. Maybe a good step is to start talking to people outside the choir? Can anyone suggest magazines/websites to submit publications to where Perl articles might broaden our exposure?

In reply to Web aps with Perl (6) vs. Longhorn and the Windows API? by spq

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