[Wellington-pm] Meeting next Tuesday

Grant McLean grant at mclean.net.nz
Fri Apr 5 21:42:39 PDT 2013


On Thu, 2013-04-04 at 03:12 +0000, Florent Mara wrote:
> On Thu, 2013-04-02 at 20:55 +0000, Grant McLean wrote:
>> I'm still keen to hear from anyone who would like to speak or anyone
>> who would like to suggest a topic.
>>
> 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'.

I'm wondering if your interest is not so much *why* Perl is not a
fashionable language, but what we can do to fix that.

Answering the 'why' is very difficult because many people who have a low
opinion of Perl don't know the language at all.  There isn't really a
reason that they dislike Perl other than it is fashionable to dislike
Perl.

I'm not suggesting that there aren't valid reasons to dislike Perl.  I'm
sure many regular Perl programmers could list things they dislike about
the language.  My personal list would start with:

 1. lack of function/method signatures in the language
 2. exception handling is harder than it should be

As to what we can do to 'fix' Perl's image problem my first suggestion
would be to build awesome things using Perl (which I believe you're
already doing) and then tell people about them.

My second suggestion would be that people who are new to Perl need
support.  If you can find someone who is prepared to give it a go then
support them with training.  Encourage them to get along to Perl
Mongers, ask questions on the mailing list or IRC channel and engage in
online forums like PerlMonks.

One concrete step is to come along to Paul Fenwick's talk on April 17th.
He will specifically be talking about things that have been happening in
the Perl world recently that address some specific shortcomings of Perl
as a language and Perl+CPAN as a platform.  I can guarantee that even
non-Perl people will find Paul's talk entertaining and at $0 it's a
pretty cheap night out.


> 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.

Indeed but it's also very hard to find good Python or Ruby developers.
And even though universities churn out large numbers of people who have
been exposed to Java, that doesn't make them 'good' Java programmers.  I
haven't anything to do with the Microsoft development languages for many
years but it used to be common for MS developers to get training and
certifications and regular product updates.  But strangely there's an
expectation that it ought to be possible to pick up Perl programmers who
just know it all already.
 
> 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".

Are these people who have coded in Perl?  If not, a training and support
plan could help.  If they're not interested in learning, they're
probably not going to make good programmers anyway.

> 3) Most consultants queried about the issue do not consider Perl as
> viable in the medium to long term.

Do they give specific reasons for these beliefs?  If our industry is not
training more Perl programmers because "Perl is dying" then it will
become a self-fulfilling prophesy and Perl will die.

Realistically, Perl, Python and Ruby are pretty much interchangeable and
all offer similar libraries for similar tasks.  Someone who is competent
in one of these languages could be cross-trained to any of the others.

I didn't include Java in that list.  Not because it's bad, but because
it's very different from the 'dynamic languages'.  In my (somewhat
limited) experience Java projects tend to be bigger and more costly.
Whereas programmers using dynamic languages are expected to achieve more
with less.

I also didn't include PHP in the list because I consider it to be
specifically for web applications whereas the other options are general
purpose programming languages.

> 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.

And your company will incur significant costs in time and money
rewriting the application in a different language.  How would that
compare with the cost of training and developing programmers to work on
the existing codebase?

> 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. 

I completely agree.

> 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. 

Well if someone would like to present on how they've managed to solve
this problem then I'd love to hear that talk :-)

Otherwise, this might be a good topic of conversation for the mid-year
social meeting (i.e. Wellington.pm at the pub).

Regards
Grant



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