Rassie's Doghouse

As is seems, my last article has left some things to be explained in more detail. Particularly, Gabor has left the following comment:

I wish people would stop blaming Perl 6 or its name on the lack of buzz around Perl. I wish people were spending that energy and time in creating more buzz.

I would like to reply to that quote by this post, since I feel that the importance of the problem has not been understood in its completeness.

The key misunderstanding here is: You can only generate buzz for something new. Let’s just make a small practical example, shall we? Let’s go to programming reddit and pick something up from the front page. How about Little known C# feature, Conditional attributes.? What do you feel when you read that article?

I can tell you what I feel: I don’t care at all. It’s nice to know that C# has that kind of attributes, but I still don’t care because of one single fact: I’m not going to programm C#. That language is out of my scope, because an immediate connection from C# to .NET to Microsoft to Windows is established and I’m a Linux/FOSS guy. Same goes for Java — however nice the newest Hibernate or JSF or jBPM or whatever might be, I’m not interested, since I try to avoid Java, because the word that I associate with Java is “restriction”¹.

Same goes for Perl[56]. You can generate as much buzz about Perl as you want, but “Perl”, as I explained previously, is a brand with definitive associations, namely “ugly” and “incomprehensible”. It doesn’t even matter which version, Perl is Perl, right? So every article about some cool new technology in Perl, be it Catalyst or DBIx::Class or Net::Twitter, will be dismissed with a comment “Yeah, it’s nice, but who’d want to code Perl nowadays?”

It’s the same problem Steve Yegge pointed out in his talk which I linked to from my last article: “Java is my father’s language, I won’t use that”. Same goes for Perl — it’s an old language and usually an old language is considered crufty and inflexible, even though it’s untrue for at least Perl and Common Lisp.

So basically, buzz for old stuff doesn’t matter. New stuff can be efficiently buzzed — look at all the attention Cassandra and all other NoSQL database engines are getting. Buzzing only matters when the stuff is new, at least from one’s point of view. And here lies a problem: Perl is extremely well-known. Just like COBOL, Perl is known by the name, even though most people can’t usually tell anything useful about the language itself. Only that they wouldn’t want to program either of these languages, since they’ve heard that they are awful. So barely anyone would consider Perl a new development and therefore a common perception exists which makes all buzzing about Perl moot.

But how can we revive Perl and show the masses that it’s still alive and kicking? We’ve got several options. Educating is probably the most time-consuming and probably also the most useless method — for one reeducated person you get couple of hundreds who’ve learned Perl is ugly. Rebranding might be a good way. Writing articles for popular magazines would probably help a lot, especially if someone were to write an article introducing a totally new and powerful programming language, revealing only at the end that it’s actually has been Perl all along. Perl desperately needs new books (I’m awaiting “Modern Perl Book” eagerly) and also a lot of showcases.

But there is really no patented recipe — Perl currently sits in a self-inflicted branding trap and it’ll be a hard ride to get out².

And Perl 6 is not helping it at all.

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• Perl’s visibility and branding (6)
• The CPAN’s new clothes (11)
• Taming cpan2dist on Ubuntu 8.10 (3)
• Rant #213, in which a 1200+ pages book is judged and dismissed by its table of contents (2)
• Private feeds in Google Reader (2)

In the recent days, several bloggers (including chromatic) have talked about Perl’s visibility in the world. Here are some thoughts of mine on Perl’s marketing and connected topics.

Self-referential promotion

I feel that most Perl marketing strategies currently in use are misguided — they appeal to people already using Perl. First and most important, the Ironman blogging competition. Its original aim has been “to promote the Perl language, and encourage more people within the Perl community to promote the language to the world outside the Perl echo-chamber”. I honestly still don’t understand why blogging about Perl in a self-contained blogging system has any influence on the people outside. Yes, we might actually get higher Google rankings, but does it help Perl itself in any way? Only people who are actively searching for Perl might find something interesting, but they won’t until the thought of actually using Perl arises. Instead, we should be writing articles and sending them to the (online) magazines about general IT or general programming, not dedicated Perl magazines. Where’s that “Ironman Article of the Month” prize I keep hearing about? We could use those articles for promoting Perl outside of its own eco-system.

The other proposal is placing “Made with Perl” banners all over your website. Seriously, do I even need to mention why this is bad? Normal people don’t give a damn about what technology your site is made with. Do you see any “.NET FTW!” banners on stackoverflow.com? Any “Proudly made with TextMate and Rails” buttons on GitHub? They are not there, because they don’t matter to the visitors.

If we want more people to choose Perl for their projects, we need to showcase Perl. Projects using Perl, be it DuckDuckGo or BBC or anything else¹ should be referenced from one single place and this place should be the frontpage of perl.org. Ruby on Rails’ front page prominently presents sites using Rails, Django has the same thing on the front page, PostgreSQL has a “Featured User” front page column. Catalyst on the other hand, just publishes some testimonials by people without referenced project or company, perl.org has a huge “20,000 CPAN modules” heading, which makes me feel like “20k of what?”. Underneath a line “That’s why we love Perl”. Yeah, right, we do, does the visitor? Such introductory websites should become more embracing and welcoming to the newbies and not look like some kind of bizarre cult to them. This part of self-promotion is extremely important, first impression counts.

Talking to others

When you talk to people about stuff you make in Perl, you mostly get some condolencing faces and a question “Couldn’t you take Python or Ruby”? Many other languages (just like Python or Ruby), have become popular with a tagline “Obsoleting Perl”, because they all thought a replacement was desperately needed. It doesn’t even matter that current Perl is more flexible or better or faster or cleaner than Python or Ruby or for that matter Perl itself from 2000. Perl has a reputation, it has become a brand name, a brand name that has negative connotations.

Have you ever watched Steve Yegge’s excellent branding keynote? If not, you should do so immediately. Even though he mentions Perl several times, another quote should stay in your mind:

    Who remembers GTE? [...] GTE was for some time the most
    reviled brand. Why? [...] their infrastructure sucked and
    their service sucked and everybody hated them. The word for
    GTE in consumer's mind was "suck". [...] They've spent a
    billion dollars upgrading their infrastructure and service
    until they were actually the best in the United States. And
    ... the people still thought they sucked, of course. [...] The
    problem is: [a brand] is a const identifier. [...] GTE was
    like "we are screwed, our brand is in the toilet". So they
    went to this marketing agency and they asked [...] "If your
    service is bad today and perfect tomorrow, how long does it
    take to change people's mind about your brand?" [...] And the
    answer came back after much study that it takes *one
    generation*. And the GTE was like "Screw that!" and changed
    their name to Verizon.

This is exactly the situation Perl is currenty in. Most people associate Perl with “scripting” or “system administration” if they mean good or “ugly” or “write-only” otherwise. And since Perl has been on the market for a long time, it’ll probably take a bit more than a generation of new programmers to get away from that image. The bad news are: very few new programmers will ever get a chance to see Perl’s bright side — Java and PHP are just excellent at recruiting newbies.

So we got to educate people about Perl as soon as it gets and show them the good sides and compare it to Java and PHP and Python and Lua etc. But in my opinion, there is one big problem with that: Perl 6.

Perl 6

Perl 6 actually warrants a separate rant about its whole structure and design, but one thing is certain: it will have the same branding problems as Perl 5. They should have called it “Rakudo” or “Parrot” or anything else, just not “Perl” and it might have been (or maybe it still will be) a successful language.

When you tell people there is a Perl 6 coming, which will be somewhat incompatible to current Perl 5 and won’t have any of the libraries or frameworks, you lose them immediately, since it’s not feasible to build something new on an obsolete technology. Perl community can’t afford not getting more people involved and it can’t afford waiting for Perl 6. It should rather use all the power it can to continue improving Modern Perl. A question still remains whether Perl 6 will be needed at all if Modern Perl implements all of its tasty features.

In a way, Perl 6 drama reminds me of another language which is “worth learning [tm]” — JavaScript². Currently implemented version of the standard is ECMAScript 3. The most recent standard version is ECMAScript 5, released in December 2009. An ECMAScript 4 has never been released, there has only been a draft of a completely incompatible overhaul of the standard, which promised to clean up the whole mess of browser scripting. Needless to say: it failed miserably, in part because of a necessary complete reimplementation and was replaced with backwards-compatible ECMAScript 5, which corrected the most obvious stupidities of the original standard and made people happy enough. To me, ECMAScript 4 has a lot of similarities to the aims of Perl 6, while ECMAScript 5 is more like Modern Perl.

Marketing Modern Perl

In my opinion, Modern Perl is the only one that should be marketed. Remember that GTE/Verizon example? While I think a new name for Perl 6 is needed, it’s possible to create a new brand for modern Perl 5 without completely sacrificing the name. How about Modern Perl for an official name for Perl 5?

5.12 could be the last official Classic Perl version and 5.14 would be Modern Perl 1.0. New filename extensions .mpl and .mpm could be introduced, which would enable warnings and strictness and Perl::Critic warnings and other new features by default, while .pl and .pm would still trigger Classic Perl mode. Disturbing features could be deprecated in the Modern Perl while retained in Classic. New features could be tested out as CPAN modules and officially introduced to the core in Modern mode.

I know it’s difficult on the compiler side. However, it’s a lot better than creating a complete new language over a decade and then creating a whole new set of libraries over another decade. We don’t actually need a perfect language, which has all the bells and whistles and fixes all of the mistakes of the previous iteration, I think the 80%/20% rule should also apply to Perl. Continuous improvement has done Perl 5 a lot of good in the last years and I think this process should be continued. With a bit of luck, Perl will then be able to live on and innovate for the upcoming decades.

Related posts

• On generating buzz (4)
• The CPAN’s new clothes (11)
• Taming cpan2dist on Ubuntu 8.10 (3)
• Rant #213, in which a 1200+ pages book is judged and dismissed by its table of contents (2)
• Private feeds in Google Reader (2)