if you build write it they will come
After reading some of the posts about renaming Perl to something else I noticed that a commonly used argument was about the language visibility. Personally I don't want to take party here and restart all the discussion about that issue, I think a lot of people more capable and committed to the language evolution already gave their opinion.
My point here is about that comment mentioned before, the language visibility and appearance. If the way how people see and remember Perl is the problem, I think that we can come up with some kind of solution without any dramatic changes in the language itself, and I'm going to tell you how, in my opinion, we could address this issue.
You see, here in Brazil we have 13 Perl Mongers groups, (one of them under my leadership), and once every year people from all parts of Brazil organize themselves to what we call 'Equinox' where the mongers are invited to write articles about something that they really enjoy about Perl, it could be how to use a specific module or how to implement something using Perl, the articles cover a whole range of uses and this has been going on for some years (since 2006 I guess). Sometimes we have themes and we get organized to cover all cool aspects and important points in using Perl.
I'm telling you that because this event we have here have its own repercussion, mainly because we can provide very good material for people in our native language, talking about cool and modern applications.
Now imagine if other Perl Mongers groups did the same thing at the same time in other countries, imagine if in the same week people from all around the world start posting articles in different languages about all the cool and modern stuff we have today about Perl and all the great stuff that composes what some like to call part of the Perl Renaissance. Perl is already really accessible to others, this could be our help to improve our language promotion.
We already have one of the most organized and active programming comunities aroud there and doing that will prove that we have lots of people working with Perl and that our language is far from being dead.
I blog about Perl, Bioinformatics, Big Data and Complex Networks.
Articles showing how to solve specific problems with Perl+CPAN is excellent, though IMHO, a constant flow of articles throughout the year is more effective than a one-week sprint.
Besides that if you'd like to reach out to other people, you need to go where they are (where they read things) and not expect that they will come to where you are.
Where do you publish the articles written during the 'Equinox'? Links please!
Hi Gabor
The articles are available at the São Paulo Perl Mongers web page (http://sao-paulo.pm.org/artigos) and they are all in Portuguese.
and yes, I agree with you, a constant flow could achieve more visibility than a short sprint, but I was thinking if this short sprint could achieve a nice repercussion if it was "global", like some sort of event that every PM group could participate.