4 days at Eth0 Summer 2010
Currently I'm located at the Dutch Eth0 Summer 2010 event, which is a camp-with-tents-and-attend-talks-and-workshops event. My younger brother who studies IT went with a bunch of classmates, and I decided to tag along.
So far it has been fun - I've done some Perl evangelising and handed out Round Tuits to random people (thanks for those Tuits, Wendy).
The overall view of Perl is the same ol' "Perl is line noise and the language hasn't seen changes in 10 years lol". While a rebuttal is easy, it's somewhat disheartening but not unexpected.
Other than that, not a bad tech festival.
A small cog in the Perl machine, I'm a happy Perl developer and have some CPAN modules here and there.
Yeah, it isn't easy to face that a lot during such events but every time you make them smile with the tuits or with the "We suck at marketing" card you take a piece of that crap away. After a while (a year or two?) they will start to actually hear the message.
Thanks for taking your part in getting the word out about Perl being there.
Any thoughts on how younger programmers get some of these opinions though? I can understand people who maybe used Perl 10 years ago or were starting out with PHP then having these views, but I'd have thought that younger programmers would either just not have heard of Perl or would see it as a bit out of date and not used much, rather than having any strong opinions on the syntax etc.
I presume there must be (older) people still spreading the "line noise" stuff about on forums, mailing lists, etc for other languages?
@Michael_J: I'm not sure - these were mostly people in their early 20s. I would presume it's the cargo culture they are exposed to in the areas of the web they visit (Forums? IRC?). Perhaps it's popular opinion to bash on Perl, just as people bash on COBOL. Or PHP, for us Perl programmers (of course we have good points to back it up ;) ).
I remember when I started with Perl about 8-9 years ago (gah, I'm getting old) I had not heard about any of these prejudices. If any, the language of line noise was C. I had to build a "dynamic website" and the tool to do that was Perl.
I'm not too worried - it might keep newer programmers from trying out Perl, but I'm sure the curious ones among them will take a peek anyway.