[Wellington-pm] Meeting next Tuesday

Florent Mara florent at nzregen.co.nz
Wed Apr 3 20:12:30 PDT 2013


Hi Grant,

I would be very interested if a Mongers evening could provide me with more insight behind Perl not being a 'sexy programming language'.

While Perl has immense power and amazes me more every time I discover a new useful package, mentioning "Perl" to software developers has most of them display facial expressions not dissimilar those of people smelling Durian for the first time. Usually followed by to strongly worded derogatory opinions about Perl.

Over the years, I have myself attempted to compile quite a few explanations being the lack of Perl appeal 
 * Ignorance from a large part of the software development community. Java is taught at University, Perl rarely is. 
 * Absence of any renowned 'trendy' Perl usage. (for ex, LinkedIn back-end hasn't been implemented using Perl tech, Android SDK doesn't cater for Perl) 
 * absence of widely used IDE (for ex, as opposed to Eclipse for Java)
 * absence of widely known/used Perl based system (as opposed to, say, JBoss)
 * Ability of coding very ugly/hard to maintain Perl (as opposed once again to Java which enforces a pre-determined structure) which unfortunately tends        
   to get more exposure than 'maintainable' Perl coding due to coding contests.
 * ... 
 * 
 * potentially the Perl developer community being near the 'geekest' part of the soft dev population makes it un-attractive to the masses. :-)
  

As I have been mainly developing Perl code on my own, I don't think I have the best understanding of the space/community but it worries me that:
1) we struggle to hire any Perl developers.
2) mention of Perl has most software developers looking for jobs running away fast often stating "I don't like Perl and will never code in Perl".
3) Most consultants queried about the issue do not consider Perl as viable in the medium to long term.
4) In the absence of resource to crack Perl code, it will disappear from where I work while being perfectly suited for the task in hand.
5) ... and I think my curiosity isn't completely dissimilar to you wondering why we don't have more people at the Perl Mongers meetings. 

Please let me know if such topic could be of interest for Mongers evening, either for a presentation or potentially for a conversation between attendees. 
Despite Evan's good work, the writing is getting everyday closer to the wall for Perl where I work.

Best regards, Florent

Florent Mara
Technical Lead
Regen Ltd
DDI +64 4 381 4451

-----Original Message-----
From: Wellington-pm [mailto:wellington-pm-bounces+florent=nzregen.co.nz at pm.org] On Behalf Of Grant McLean
Sent: Tuesday, 2 April 2013 8:55 p.m.
To: Wellington Perl Mongers
Subject: [Wellington-pm] Meeting next Tuesday

Hi Mongers

The next meeting of Wellington Perl Mongers is next Tuesday - April 9th.

    6:00pm Tuesday 9 April 2013
    Level 3, Catalyst House
    150 Willis Street
    Wellington
    http://wellington.pm.org/

I'm still keen to hear from anyone who would like to speak or anyone who would like to suggest a topic.

Cheers
Grant

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