Changing Image of Perl
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Dijk, Wendy G.A. van
Beginning of this century, because of perceived stagnation in development, andflamewars, and obfuscated Perl, and the rise of other programming languages,and other reasons, the attitude towards Perl became negative. We noticed andcared, so we stopped the flamewars and the obfuscated code, we organised moreand better conferences, workshops and hackathons, we made sure we are morefriendly and helpful to newbies (and oldies), and in general we become morevisible. Things changed so much, we nowadays even get compliments at opensource conferences! I will talk about our booths and devroom at FOSDEM, andour Perl-presence at other open source conferences, and our own Perl-swag.
 I will start my talk now. Thank you very much for coming here and so many people here. Thank you. I want to talk a bit about the changing image of Pearl. I'm doing Pearl since 1994. I'm a bad programmer. I learned Pearl five times. I forgot everything about it again five times. So nowadays I just don't learn Pearl anymore. I just do marketing for Pearl. So this year Pearl gets 30 years old. And by the time Pearl five was really released in 1994, it was very popular and people were very popular about Pearl. Yeah, we can do everything with Pearl. Almost nobody said something bad about Pearl. We got a nice image of problem solvers in different ways, like the duct tape of the internet or the Swiss Army chainsaw. And I've been there several times that Pearl has been used as a Swiss Army chainsaw that other programmers have said, we can't make this prototype with our language. So make it with Pearl. And then they stuck with Pearl because it was nice. At several times they kept with Pearl until now, like Booking.com. 99% of Booking.com is written in Pearl. Maybe 98.5% by now, but whoever. At some point the popularity went a bit sour. Pearl people started flame wars between themselves and with other programming languages. A lot of people agreed that we needed a break in backward compatibility, which led to Pearl six at some point. At the moment, Pearl five to 24 is still backward compatible to way back. I hope that more Pearl people learn the diplomacy that most Pearl six people have agreed to do. Pearl five people are getting better at it. Nicer. There's hardly any Pearl five person online anymore that says, you all stupid. Some of you know who I mean. At some point, Python and Ruby and Java and JavaScript became more and more popular and not all those people were as friendly towards Pearl. And I'm quite sure that it was vice versa. My language is better than yours. I like to say your language can do everything that you need as a programmer. My language can do everything as well. There's no need to call each other names. Be friendly to what you sort of you learn from them. They learn from us. We help them to develop something and vice versa. We are all in there together. We're open source. Why would be be nasty, but still people didn't listen to me or anybody else who tried to keep things friendly. So this is what people said to me. So this is my eighth foster that I have a booth here and people said that stuff to me. And that was what somebody called me at some point. Well, I think I'm looking better than that, but still. Yes, that was as well. You should not be here. I had a guy coming three years in a row at FOSDEM here. As soon as he saw the Pearl booth, he started screaming. You should not be here. You should die. You should fuck off and stuff like that. He when he was finished. I laughed at him. I love you too. Making him completely confused and he went away. But then actually he came again. Did the same. He hasn't been there for the last two years. Makes me very happy. So at the time I was like that. I don't want to be sad and my partner over there and we wanted to take action and we decided let's try to change something about that. Not many people were working on a marketing for Pearl. We even had business cards handed out by people. We suck at marketing. What? Come on. We don't suck at marketing. We just have to do it. As soon as we do it, we do it like everything else. We have wonderful modules. We have a wonderful programming language. We have wonderful Pearl Munger meetings. If you said, I'll mind to it, we do wonderful marketing as well. So I tried to show that. So yeah, those are the marketing. So we now have a whole lot of stuff for marketing. And at some point I kept maintaining a calendar of Pearl events of places to go to and trying to go out of the echo chamber. So not just Pearl workshops and Yapsie, but also to FOSCON as well. And I've been at Linux user group meetings and stuff. And they were so surprised to see Pearl people there. And then we noticed that they shouldn't be because our booth was one of the most popular booths. People came back, oh, I'm so happy to see Pearl. Wonderful. Oh, you're selling camels. How much are they? Wonderful. So well, we've been here since 10. So this is the 8-1 deaf room. This is the seventh time we have a deaf room. Oskron booth, lots of other stuff. This is a typical Pearl booth. And that's my buddy Mark Keating. Mark Keating is the marketing chair of the Pearl Foundation and has his own company. And he has done the London Pearl workshop for 10 years in a row. And he's now taking over by some other people because he was fed up with it. We sell a lot of stuff. We give away a lot of stuff. So how many program-lending companies do you know who have all this type of stuff? So like I know people who have a nice stuffed animal or some beer with their name on it. It's just regular beer with their name printed on top of it. It's not that beer. This is made for us. The Pearl 6 wine was made for Pearl. Ha. So after all the negativity we said, keep calm, code-burel and do more. So we still need a lot more. We need people who write books, new versions of books. I asked at some point to O'Reilly, please make some more Pearl 6 books or Pearl best practices. We want to have a second edition of that. It seems to be difficult for some reason. Really, educational materials for trainers, for schools, etc. Yesterday I had a professor at my booth, took a whole bunch of to-its because of students don't do their homework. They keep asking me, please make some educational materials. We don't have that many teachers that teach Pearl. So it's difficult. We need articles written about Pearl. We need journalists at Pearl events and we need more. If you're organizing a Pearl event or whatever event as well, invite journalists to your event. They will write about your event. They might write about your programming language. They might write about Pearl or MySQL or whatever. All that stuff is good for open source. There's too many managers of big companies that think that open source is nothing because it's free. It's nothing. Well, I don't say that's nothing. I think that's quite a lot of people. This was the picture just before Larry Wall announced that Pearl 6 would be done right here. That's two years ago now. There he was doing that, announcing Pearl 6. That was that. Both died here. Nice. So next year, hang on. So we're doing that stuff. We're bringing Pearl to the people. Every now and then we kick some people in the behind to write some stuff. And that's what I do. I make swag. By now I gave away over 35,000 to its 25,000 stickers, 20,000 buttons, 200 pens, batch extenders. Those little ribbons that you hang on your back. Broschers from different types. I asked people to give me their swag. So companies give me their brochures about how they want to hire Pearl people or that they do Pearl as well. And if any of you, your company has some Pearl swag that you want to be given out that other Pearl events give it to me and I will put them on the table. No questions asked. If it's Pearl, I will give it away. I sold a lot of stuff as well. And I'm not making money on this. This is community prices. I sell it for what it costs. And I find out that people sometimes are quite happy with it. Sometimes they still think it's too expensive. I don't care. Those batches that you see here, every batch pays for one hour of work by a Pearl core developer like the Jonathan Wierdington for Pearl 6. And I myself sold 50 of those already. So I made sure that 50 hours have been worked on Pearl 5 and or Pearl 6 core work. I think that's quite nice. Because of that, a lot of bugs have been solved or new features have been added. This is a typical Pearl death room. I should make a picture of this, but no, I'm too lazy. We stopped the Flame Wars. We stopped obfuscated code contests. We came in with modern Pearl. What Chromatic did. We made it a meme. Modern Pearl. Not anymore the old Pearl. We won't have stuff that is documented, easy to read, maintainable. So that people come to my booth and say, oh no, Pearl. That's a white ones language. No, it's not. We have a lot of other stuff. And we try to keep a friendly face and friendly writing and we like to welcome newbies. And something like 10 years ago, we agreed all of that. 10, 12 years ago, we started this change of being more welcoming and stuff. It's paying off. It really is. We've got more jobs. We've got recruitment agencies only focusing on Pearl jobs. And Pearl companies come to them, I need more. They already all of the Pearl people have a job. I don't know many unemployed Pearl people. That's a good thing, but also a bad thing because we need more. It's not a good thing when a company cannot hire Pearl people and then they switch to Python or Ruby or Java or something. It's not good for Pearl. It's good for the other things, but not for us. So we've got more newbies. I've been to conference in Romania. Looked around the room, it's half of the people are young and 25. This was an amazing thing. Lots of women, by the way, as well. Lots more than here. Welcome women. Thank you. So help Pearl and help yourself. Write, blog, present, give presentations like I'm doing now. Go to a hackathon or with your local user group. I have seen some blogs. Go to expose, donate, support other ways, chat, touch, whatever. And when you write an article or blog or make a website about Pearl, don't call it just Pearl all the time. It's Pearl programming language at least once on every page, at least once. And why? Because Tyobi doesn't look for Pearl. It looks for Pearl programming language. So if everybody does this, we will rise to number five in the index again. No, really. That's how it works. Three years ago, we were number 12. Somebody found out that that's how Tyobi works. Why didn't we know that? Because we didn't search for that. Somebody searched for that and we all started promoting doing it like this, that the page will have that text on it. And since then, we rose to number 10, 9. At the moment, we are eight or seven, I think. I think that's a good thing. Managers look at that list. I know about managers who look at the list. Top 10 is fine. Anything lower than top 10, we don't use anymore. Get rid of all that junk. Nobody's using that. So they see Pearl on 708 and they think, oh, fine. That's a nice block. It's a bit of a long URL. I will give this PDF to the website and you can get it there. And that's just about that Tyobi thing. So some more nice, shiny pictures of us being happy with Pearl. And the last three years I noticed we don't have or almost have no nasty comments at the Pearl booth. Yesterday I had two. Both of them, Python people. Nothing else, only Python people. Ruby people come to us and say, hey, Pearl, nice to see you. Java people. I'm using Pearl all the time. My work is Java, but all the other stuff like sysadmin work, I use Pearl for that. Excellent. Nice. Thank you. And this year as well, I just had a very nice comment of a Ruby programmer. Very nice. Oh, you've got Pearl 6 books. I'm going to buy that. What? But you're working with Ruby. Learn something else like Haskell, Erlang. Nah, Pearl 6, it looks nice. Okay, fine. So make me happy, happier than I already have because Pearl booth is going like crazy. Help change the image of Pearl. Help me do the same stuff as I do or find out new ways. There's more than one way to make me happy, like everything in Pearl. And thank you very much. That's all. Do I have time for questions? Are there any questions? I still have five minutes. Well, maybe somebody wants to set up that computer. Any questions? Any discussions, stuff? Anybody want to tell me? Well, you said stopping the obfuscated code comments. Yeah? I want to really say that as a man. I can bring you in contact with several managers who complained that you're only busy with stuff that nobody can read, understand or maintain. Stop doing that because... It's really fun. Yes, but do it in your own time and don't make a contest of it. You should copy and rephrase like stop coding in a post-implicit way. There have been some changes in Pearl 5 lately which stopped some implicit things into guiding people wrongly. The extra. Yes, exactly. Any more? No. Thank you very much.
 I will start my talk now. Thank you very much for coming here and so many people here. Thank you.  I want to talk a bit about the changing image of Pearl. I'm doing Pearl since 1994. I'm a bad programmer.  I learned Pearl five times. I forgot everything about it again five times. So nowadays I just don't learn Pearl anymore.  I just do marketing for Pearl. So this year Pearl gets 30 years old. And by the time Pearl five was really released in 1994,  it was very popular and people were very popular about Pearl. Yeah, we can do everything with Pearl.  Almost nobody said something bad about Pearl. We got a nice image of problem solvers in different ways,  like the duct tape of the internet or the Swiss Army chainsaw. And I've been there several times that Pearl has been used  as a Swiss Army chainsaw that other programmers have said,  we can't make this prototype with our language. So make it with Pearl. And then they stuck with Pearl because it was nice.  At several times they kept with Pearl until now, like Booking.com.  99% of Booking.com is written in Pearl. Maybe 98.5% by now, but whoever.  At some point the popularity went a bit sour. Pearl people started flame wars between themselves and with other programming languages.  A lot of people agreed that we needed a break in backward compatibility, which led to Pearl six at some point.  At the moment, Pearl five to 24 is still backward compatible to way back.  I hope that more Pearl people learn the diplomacy that most Pearl six people have agreed to do.  Pearl five people are getting better at it. Nicer. There's hardly any Pearl five person online anymore that says,  you all stupid. Some of you know who I mean.  At some point, Python and Ruby and Java and JavaScript became more and more popular and not all those people were as friendly towards Pearl.  And I'm quite sure that it was vice versa. My language is better than yours.  I like to say your language can do everything that you need as a programmer.  My language can do everything as well. There's no need to call each other names.  Be friendly to what you sort of you learn from them. They learn from us.  We help them to develop something and vice versa. We are all in there together.  We're open source. Why would be be nasty, but still people didn't listen to me or anybody else who tried to keep things friendly.  So this is what people said to me. So this is my eighth foster that I have a booth here and people said that stuff to me.  And that was what somebody called me at some point.  Well, I think I'm looking better than that, but still. Yes, that was as well.  You should not be here. I had a guy coming three years in a row at FOSDEM here.  As soon as he saw the Pearl booth, he started screaming. You should not be here.  You should die. You should fuck off and stuff like that. He when he was finished.  I laughed at him. I love you too. Making him completely confused and he went away.  But then actually he came again. Did the same. He hasn't been there for the last two years.  Makes me very happy. So at the time I was like that.  I don't want to be sad and my partner over there and we wanted to take action and we decided let's try to change something about that.  Not many people were working on a marketing for Pearl. We even had business cards handed out by people.  We suck at marketing. What? Come on. We don't suck at marketing. We just have to do it.  As soon as we do it, we do it like everything else. We have wonderful modules.  We have a wonderful programming language. We have wonderful Pearl Munger meetings.  If you said, I'll mind to it, we do wonderful marketing as well. So I tried to show that.  So yeah, those are the marketing. So we now have a whole lot of stuff for marketing.  And at some point I kept maintaining a calendar of Pearl events of places to go to and trying to go out of the echo chamber.  So not just Pearl workshops and Yapsie, but also to FOSCON as well.  And I've been at Linux user group meetings and stuff. And they were so surprised to see Pearl people there.  And then we noticed that they shouldn't be because our booth was one of the most popular booths.  People came back, oh, I'm so happy to see Pearl. Wonderful. Oh, you're selling camels. How much are they?  Wonderful.  So well, we've been here since 10. So this is the 8-1 deaf room. This is the seventh time we have a deaf room.  Oskron booth, lots of other stuff. This is a typical Pearl booth. And that's my buddy Mark Keating.  Mark Keating is the marketing chair of the Pearl Foundation and has his own company.  And he has done the London Pearl workshop for 10 years in a row.  And he's now taking over by some other people because he was fed up with it.  We sell a lot of stuff. We give away a lot of stuff.  So how many program-lending companies do you know who have all this type of stuff?  So like I know people who have a nice stuffed animal or some beer with their name on it.  It's just regular beer with their name printed on top of it. It's not that beer.  This is made for us. The Pearl 6 wine was made for Pearl. Ha.  So after all the negativity we said, keep calm, code-burel and do more.  So we still need a lot more. We need people who write books, new versions of books.  I asked at some point to O'Reilly, please make some more Pearl 6 books or Pearl best practices.  We want to have a second edition of that. It seems to be difficult for some reason.  Really, educational materials for trainers, for schools, etc.  Yesterday I had a professor at my booth, took a whole bunch of to-its because of students don't do their homework.  They keep asking me, please make some educational materials.  We don't have that many teachers that teach Pearl. So it's difficult.  We need articles written about Pearl. We need journalists at Pearl events and we need more.  If you're organizing a Pearl event or whatever event as well, invite journalists to your event.  They will write about your event. They might write about your programming language.  They might write about Pearl or MySQL or whatever. All that stuff is good for open source.  There's too many managers of big companies that think that open source is nothing because it's free. It's nothing.  Well, I don't say that's nothing. I think that's quite a lot of people.  This was the picture just before Larry Wall announced that Pearl 6 would be done right here.  That's two years ago now. There he was doing that, announcing Pearl 6.  That was that. Both died here. Nice. So next year, hang on.  So we're doing that stuff. We're bringing Pearl to the people. Every now and then we kick some people in the behind to write some stuff.  And that's what I do. I make swag.  By now I gave away over 35,000 to its 25,000 stickers, 20,000 buttons, 200 pens, batch extenders.  Those little ribbons that you hang on your back. Broschers from different types.  I asked people to give me their swag. So companies give me their brochures about how they want to hire Pearl people or that they do Pearl as well.  And if any of you, your company has some Pearl swag that you want to be given out that other Pearl events give it to me and I will put them on the table.  No questions asked. If it's Pearl, I will give it away.  I sold a lot of stuff as well. And I'm not making money on this. This is community prices. I sell it for what it costs.  And I find out that people sometimes are quite happy with it. Sometimes they still think it's too expensive. I don't care.  Those batches that you see here, every batch pays for one hour of work by a Pearl core developer like the Jonathan Wierdington for Pearl 6.  And I myself sold 50 of those already. So I made sure that 50 hours have been worked on Pearl 5 and or Pearl 6 core work.  I think that's quite nice. Because of that, a lot of bugs have been solved or new features have been added.  This is a typical Pearl death room. I should make a picture of this, but no, I'm too lazy.  We stopped the Flame Wars. We stopped obfuscated code contests. We came in with modern Pearl.  What Chromatic did. We made it a meme. Modern Pearl. Not anymore the old Pearl.  We won't have stuff that is documented, easy to read, maintainable.  So that people come to my booth and say, oh no, Pearl. That's a white ones language. No, it's not.  We have a lot of other stuff. And we try to keep a friendly face and friendly writing and we like to welcome newbies.  And something like 10 years ago, we agreed all of that. 10, 12 years ago, we started this change of being more welcoming and stuff.  It's paying off. It really is.  We've got more jobs. We've got recruitment agencies only focusing on Pearl jobs.  And Pearl companies come to them, I need more. They already all of the Pearl people have a job.  I don't know many unemployed Pearl people. That's a good thing, but also a bad thing because we need more.  It's not a good thing when a company cannot hire Pearl people and then they switch to Python or Ruby or Java or something.  It's not good for Pearl. It's good for the other things, but not for us.  So we've got more newbies. I've been to conference in Romania.  Looked around the room, it's half of the people are young and 25. This was an amazing thing.  Lots of women, by the way, as well. Lots more than here.  Welcome women. Thank you.  So help Pearl and help yourself. Write, blog, present, give presentations like I'm doing now.  Go to a hackathon or with your local user group.  I have seen some blogs. Go to expose, donate, support other ways, chat, touch, whatever.  And when you write an article or blog or make a website about Pearl, don't call it just Pearl all the time.  It's Pearl programming language at least once on every page, at least once.  And why? Because Tyobi doesn't look for Pearl. It looks for Pearl programming language.  So if everybody does this, we will rise to number five in the index again.  No, really. That's how it works.  Three years ago, we were number 12. Somebody found out that that's how Tyobi works.  Why didn't we know that? Because we didn't search for that.  Somebody searched for that and we all started promoting doing it like this, that the page will have that text on it.  And since then, we rose to number 10, 9. At the moment, we are eight or seven, I think.  I think that's a good thing. Managers look at that list.  I know about managers who look at the list. Top 10 is fine. Anything lower than top 10, we don't use anymore.  Get rid of all that junk. Nobody's using that.  So they see Pearl on 708 and they think, oh, fine.  That's a nice block. It's a bit of a long URL.  I will give this PDF to the website and you can get it there.  And that's just about that Tyobi thing.  So some more nice, shiny pictures of us being happy with Pearl.  And the last three years I noticed we don't have or almost have no nasty comments at the Pearl booth.  Yesterday I had two. Both of them, Python people.  Nothing else, only Python people.  Ruby people come to us and say, hey, Pearl, nice to see you.  Java people. I'm using Pearl all the time.  My work is Java, but all the other stuff like sysadmin work, I use Pearl for that.  Excellent. Nice. Thank you.  And this year as well, I just had a very nice comment of a Ruby programmer.  Very nice. Oh, you've got Pearl 6 books. I'm going to buy that.  What? But you're working with Ruby.  Learn something else like Haskell, Erlang.  Nah, Pearl 6, it looks nice. Okay, fine.  So make me happy, happier than I already have because Pearl booth is going like crazy.  Help change the image of Pearl. Help me do the same stuff as I do or find out new ways.  There's more than one way to make me happy, like everything in Pearl.  And thank you very much.  That's all.  Do I have time for questions? Are there any questions?  I still have five minutes.  Well, maybe somebody wants to set up that computer.  Any questions? Any discussions, stuff?  Anybody want to tell me?  Well, you said stopping the obfuscated code comments.  Yeah?  I want to really say that as a man.  I can bring you in contact with several managers who complained that you're only busy with stuff  that nobody can read, understand or maintain. Stop doing that because...  It's really fun.  Yes, but do it in your own time and don't make a contest of it.  You should copy and rephrase like stop coding in a post-implicit way.  There have been some changes in Pearl 5 lately which stopped some implicit things  into guiding people wrongly.  The extra.  Yes, exactly.  Any more?  No.  Thank you very much.
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