Frozen Perl 2011: Perl Marketing and Evangelism
This is the first of two talks by oZ.
He likes Perl a lot, in the last few years there has been a fundamental change in Perl. Things like the modern Perl movement, chromatic's Modern Perl book, Moose, Catalyst and DBIx::Class changed how we can use Perl.
Even with all that Perl has an image problem.
What are the Perl companies we trot out: LiveJournal, Ticketmaster, Amazon and SixApart.
He noted that some of them are moving on to other languages for their new development and that some have written Perl in such a way that makes one not want to ever use Perl again.
Nick then presented some of the research he was done. Looking at sites like LangPop, doing searches in sites like Craigslist and sending out a survey to the many people and groups he knows.
He had lots of interesting quotes and such that I didn't put in my notes. I'm hoping he'll put the slides up on the Frozen Perl site. Looks of data to look at and ponder.
He talked about evangelism and the communication of the Perl community with everyone else. Stuff like the Ironman challenge, how the main Perl web sites compare to Ruby (and I think Python) and some other things I forgot to write down.
There was a brief discussion at the end of his talk and brian d foy made a good point. What geeks think about marketing (and how they do it) is very different from how Marketers do it.
Thought provoking.
I blog about Perl.
MY point was that Perl people don't do marketing because they don't even know what it is. Their perception of the word and what it means doesn't translate to anything that helps anyone or gives anyone useful guidance on what to do next. Mostly, as Nick pointed out, we play to the Perl fan base.