Perl publishing and attracting new developers

[Avleen Vig]

Trolling aside, I've come to an understanding about this recently which can
best be described thus:

Peel has entered the Erlang stage of its life cycle. It is a very capable
language, which became popular at a time when there was a great need for
the things it provided.

Since then it has seen less and less use in the areas of industry which
have had the most rapid growth (mostly web development and operations).

Ruby and php pretty much dominate that sphere. Python has a decent foothold
in parts of academia.

Also a lot of this comes down to money. Guido, Rasmus, Matz all push the
developments in their languages as part of their day jobs. They work at
some pretty high profile places too.
Larry? I honestly don't know what Larry does. And surprisingly I could find
out quickly either.

Yes, a lot of banks and other places use Perl, and Perl is not dying as so
many like to proclaim. But it needsa lot of push from the top, a lot of
evangelism, and more, faster development. Otherwise people just kinda lose
interest, you know?

Perl is fine. I don't think there will be some great Perl revival but it's
not going away either.
On Sep 18, 2013 8:24 AM, "gvim" <gvimrc at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't mean to troll. In fact, to quote Stevan Little, "I totally asshat
> Perl" :) but when I saw this today:
>
> http://wegotcoders.com
>
> ... I couldn't help thinking Perl is getting left behind.
>
> A contributing factor seems to be the narrow range of Perl books published
> in recent years despite the Modern Perl renaissance. If you look at the
> number of Ruby/Rails/Sinatra and Python books published in the last 5 years
> compared with Perl the contrast is stark. There are stacks of Ruby and
> Rails books covering very specialised applications. Perl books, by
> contrast, tend to be just general tomes - Perl Best Practices, Programming
> Perl, Modern Perl, Pro Perl etc. We have one decent web framework book on
> Catalyst by Apress, if you discount the first effort by Packt, compared
> with stacks of Rails and Sinatra books.
>
> Take a look at these new, vibrant publishing companies:
>
> www.leanpub.com
> www.pragprog.com
>
> Not a single Perl title. Surely Moose, Mojolicious or Dancer would have
> been a candidate?
>
> Something's gone wrong. Is it that publishers are not interested in
> publishing Perl books or that Perl authors aren't writing about interesting
> and specific applications of Perl?
>
> gvim
>