[Epo-marketing] marketing

[Tom Metro]

I've been on the EPO announce list for a while, but only joined the 
marketing list shortly after the recent discussion broke out on the 
announce list, first over the place mats and then over Padre. (Seems 
like more of a discussion list tan an announce list.)

Recently the Boston.pm organizer took note of what was done for CeBit 
and wondered if Boston.pm should do something similar for the local 
LinuxCon.

I read one of the reviews of the Perl booth at CeBit and it sounds like 
it worked out well for them, but I'm not entirely sure what the message 
should be about Perl these days. There's certainly enthusiasm for 
promoting Perl, but it isn't clear that we can articulate compelling 
reasons for using Perl.

The CeBit approach seemed to be to answer whatever random questions that 
came up, and to show off demos of a few projects. While that doesn't 
hurt the situation, a more organized and intentional approach might do 
better. (I had the same thought when reviewing the place mats, which 
seemed to draw attention to specific projects, but didn't communicate 
why those Perl solutions were compelling.)

What I've been wondering is whether EPO has researched the reasons why 
developers have left Perl, the impression they have of Perl, and their 
concerns over using it on a work project. (Of course we can all 
speculate and guess at the answers to these, but there's danger in doing 
so from within the community, as those that have stuck with Perl have 
obviously not considered the deficiencies significant enough to justify 
abandoning the language.)

Once you understand the "customer perspective" better, you can then 
address it with all the marketing techniques that engineers hate, but 
are still effective on us: case studies (big names that still use Perl), 
statistics (CPAN modules, number of Perl jobs/programmers), feature 
comparisons (Perl vs. Python vs. Ruby), specific demos showing how to 
solve a common problem more effectively with Perl, talking points, etc.

  -Tom