On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 9:41 AM, Eric Wilhelm <enoba...@gmail.com> wrote: > # from Gabor Szabo > # on Wednesday 01 December 2010 13:46: > >>Many modules on CPAN also need improvements. >>But even what we have today we could achieve much better results if >>the perception of people was better. >> >>With my original question I wanted to know what technological and >>perception related issues people see. We already got some material but >>I'd be happy to see more comments. Especially from those who work with >>people who are not involved in the Perl community. How do your peers >>and your bosses see Perl? > > We have all heard the "conventional wisdom" that "perl is dead". But, > anything related to perception which cannot be solved by writing > modules is probably off-topic for this list.
I think this is one of the issues we have. For every topic we tend to setup a separate mailing list (or sometimes more) and try to segregate the people to that list. So there is an "advocacy" list a "marketing" list - both are almost deserted. The latter does not even have a public archive. In the meantime module-authors arrive to the conclusion that they need to change language in order to put food on the table. And I don't blame them. I'd go further. Because we have all these perl specific mailing list we tend to talk among ourselves. Which is safe (well, except of the occassional trashing and bashing) but which means others don't hear us and we don't hear others. > Technological issues with the CPAN and its modules abound. We have 20+ > years worth of code and archives to maintain and we're running short on > maintainers. See here: http://kfsone.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/take-that-python/ So what are the plans. How do we get more people to maintain code on CPAN? And what are the priorities? Most people will want to spend their time on writing new fun code. Maintaining old code, documenting it, fixing obscure bugs, making sure it also works on windows. None of these are priorities of the average Open source Perl developers. OTOH companies invested in Perl tend to want that too. Gabor ps. Have I already mentioned that this is the gap we are trying to bridge with the Perl Ecosystem Group?
