[Epo-marketing] marketing

[Chris Prather]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 6:29 PM, Tom Metro
<tmetro+enlightenedperl-marketing at tommetro.com> wrote:
> 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.
>


My quick response is have you read Piers' "Falling out of Love with a
Language" http://www.bofh.org.uk/2010/03/10/falling-out-of-love-with-a-language
?

It is based on work he's doing for the EPO on the funded Moose grant
so technically is "EPO work" but is based on a very small sample size
(himself).

I'll need to come up with a longer response when I have a chance tonight.

-Chris