in reply to Modern Perl and the Future of Perl

I think it's the usual suspects: write articles demonstrating how nice the stuff is, and get them run in Linux-oriented magazines, Oreillynet.com, and other places people go for new tech info. Get them Slashdotted.

The only other thing that comes to mind is branding. There's an oft-repeated story about how the most hated phone company PacBell changed its name to Verizon in order to dump the old brand's stigma. Some kind of new designation for modern Perl + modern coding practices (strict, Perl::Critic, perltidy) + quality modules could work. Attempts so far (P5EE) have not gotten anywhere in part because they were too small and had little community support, or had unclear goals. A pure re-branding effort is possible. A recent example with different goals might be Strawberry Perl.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Modern Perl and the Future of Perl
by doom (Deacon) on Dec 21, 2007 at 05:07 UTC

    Attempts so far (P5EE) have not gotten anywhere in part because they were too small and had little community support, or had unclear goals.

    Yes, speaking of "branding" problems, P5EE is a nice idea, but I'm afraid it's a terrible name, guaranteed to be uninspiring to perl programmers. Almost by definition perl programmers are people who don't want to be Java programmers, and are likely to be lukewarm on the idea that perl needs to be more like Java.

    (P5EE has a nice list of recommended perl modules: P5EE Components... I sometimes toy with the idea of creating a perl-centric linux distro, where all the P5EE modules would be installed by default).

[reply]
(OT) Re^2: Modern Perl and the Future of Perl
by Argel (Prior) on Dec 20, 2007 at 23:47 UTC
    There's an oft-repeated story about how the most hated phone company PacBell changed its name to Verizon in order to dump the old brand's stigma.

    That's a couple thousand miles off! When BellAtlantic and GTE merged the name chosen for the new company was "Verizon". See the Verizon Wikipedia article for more.

[reply]
      Oh, I think you're right, it was a different phone company. Possibly AT&T changing its name from Southwestern Bell?
[reply]
        Actually, I didn't think SBC had that bad of a reputation compared to some of the others in the industry. I always assumed they went with the more recognizable brand name. Of course, you have to laugh at the irony of AT&T selling off their wireless division to Cingular only to have Cingular become part of "The New AT&T" a few years later.

        Maybe you just confused Pacbell with BellAtlantic. BA didn't exactly have the best reputation.

        I have seen some smaller Telcos changes names for apparently that reason

[reply]
Re^2: Modern Perl and the Future of Perl
by amarquis (Curate) on Dec 21, 2007 at 15:23 UTC

    I think it would be worth your rolling this into a separate meditation. We all have this skill, coding Perl, and it is to the benefit of everybody if that skill is well respected.

    Last night I did something I thought was awesome with Perl, but you know what? I didn't tell anybody about it. I didn't mention it to fellow programmers, blog about, any of that. Mostly because I didn't think about it.

    A big friendly reminder to promote neat things done in Perl would be nice :).

[reply]

In Section Meditations