On development in perl
If you go to a bookstore to get some books about modern software development, you will find a lot there, but all these books are written from and written for the "java-guys". In my opinion we need to show, that you can use all these techniques in perl too...
Test Driven Development
I cannot remember a time, where modules in perl from cpan were without a test-suite, and we have many test-modules out there, but all the books about tdd are about Java or .Net.
Automatic Acceptance Tests
All agile developers love automatisation. There is Fit developed in java and you need some time to find Test::C2FIT and even then, the documentation is not so easy to read, so we germans are happy to find the Fit Cookbook (in german)
Domain Specific Language (DSL)
I don't know a language in wich it is easier to build up domain-specific-languages, but if you look up the books, you will again find examples in java and in ruby.
Easy Web-Frameworks
Beginners will today start with php or ruby on rails, why does noone recognizes the beautiful catalyst?
Object Oriented Programming
Again most of the books are about Java and .Net, where is the book concerning Moose?
I think, we need to have better "marketing" and we need some books, showing all the "modern techniques" in the market with our valueable tools in perl.
I blog about Perl and "modern software development", english is not my mother tongue (I am german), so I hope you get, what I mean :-)
To get books, we need people who buy books.
But, why should we have to republish all the ideas in the world for every computer language? Even without knowing some of the languages, I get a lot from their books.
And bookstores? That's the worst place to look for books.
There's nothing stopping you from writing one of those books yourself. :)
Bookstores themselves aren't very "modern."
:)The problem of public perception is a legitimate problem in the Perl community. There’s a general lack of recognition and ʀ.ᴇ.s.ᴘ.ᴇ.ᴄ.ᴛ. for Perl as a programming language. I was recently told by a Google headhunter that a Perl background limited one to sysadmin jobs, not to programming jobs, the same way they’d relegate someone with Javascript to webby jobs.
It was outrageous, as though Perl were a shell script or something. But that’s how that distressingly many people think of Perl. They don’t even classify it as a programming language.
There’s even an argument to be heard that it’s our own fault, not so much by being a sin of commission as one of omision. We just haven’t had the moneyed backing of gigabuck corporate marketing (Oracle Java, Google Python).
Nor, for some reason, do we have advocates and activists going through all the Wikipedia pages and making sure that Perl is mentioned whenever general programming articles mention several languages.
Well, why not? That’s certainly a lot faster and easier to do than writing a book, plus it’s a game the whole family can play. And it would reach more people, too. I therefore in perfect seriousness strongly urge the Perl community to set about remedying these unconscionable but easily fixable lacunæ, one web page at a time. Merely Google for:
site:en.wikipedia.org programming python java -perl
And then in any and all pages where it makes sense to so, remedy the oversight by adding the appropriate mention of Perl in that context. Stay technically accurate, level-headed, non-cheerleading, and preferably brief. Even if each person got to do only a page or two a day, with enough volunteers it wouldn’t take long for this to make a big difference. Google’s ranking even helps set priorities so that the most noticed pages get fixed first.
Anybody and everybody can do this — and should. It will help a lot.
Please.
Why not do a short dedicated PDF of "TDD in Perl" and give it away free and use one of the print on demand to ask for $$$ if the user wants a dead tree version?
Also, doesn't "Perl Testing - A Developer's Notebook" cover some of that?