How to bring newbies to perl?

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Introduction ● I'm Upasana – Working at booking.com – Contribute to some FOSS projects ● Contact me: – [email protected] – upasana on irc.perl.org & irc.freenode.net

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The culprit!

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What I am going to present ● Perl is short of newbies – Is it true? – Why? – how can we bring more newbies to Perl?

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Disclaimer ● While preparing for this talk, I was short of content. ● I asked at various places for people's opinions on this topic. ● I got a very good response from everywhere. ● So, opinions could be of my friends, family, colleagues or may be of some internet trolls.

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Who's a newbie? ● Someone doing perl programming for 3 or less than 3 years.

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What made me think of it? ● I've plenty of friends in the perl community – Of various age groups. – Of various experience levels. – But most of them have been doing perl for more than 3 years

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What made me think of it? ● I came across this repository of implementation of various algorithms in various languages – https://github.com/kennyledet/Algorithm-Implementations ● But Perl was missing! :(

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What made me think of it? ● A friend shared this – http://raftconsensus.github.io/ – Raft is a consensus algorithm for fault-tolerant distributed systems. ● He also shared the fact that Perl is missing there. ● I didn't know about it until he told me :(.

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Perl is short of newbies ● When I told this to people, some of them asked me for statistics. ● So, I asked some Perl trainers for statistics. ● Sadly, I can't present the raw data due to privacy issues. ● I extracted statistical trends from that data.

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Statistics 2004-05 2005-06 2006-07 2007-08 2008-09 2009-10 2010-11 2011-12 2012-13 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 66 62 78 56 76 72 37 20 18 Number of peope attended the course Year

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Why people left Perl! ● Bad reputation of older perl language – Web development was a pain ● CGI

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No easy way of doing OOP

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Why people left perl! ● Documentation & syntax are difficult to understand as compared to other languages. ● Bad reputation of perl community in past.

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Why people left perl! ● As a result of last two points – People who learnt Perl 10 years ago, moved towards other languages(python, ruby) in past. – They never came back!

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But now, it has changed ● For web development – Catalyst. – Mojolicious, Dancer, AMON.

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But now, it has changed! ● For OOP – Moose, Moo, p5-mop. – And yes, p5-mop may go into perl core in future.

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PERL COMMUNITY IS NOT BAD AT ALL

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Our good things

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Our good things ● Great support for text-processing ● ack ● Request Tracker ● Bugzilla

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Our good things ● CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) ● Friendly & helpful community.

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Our good things ● Multi-purpose language – Web development – System administration – Desktop applications

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But we've some bad[1] things as well [1] they were awesome when they were invented, but not anymore

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Our bad things ● Good CMS – blogs.perl.org is a good example of it

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Our bad things ● Our website – No success stories – Really old look – No REPL

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Uncategorized perly traits ● TIMTOWTDI (There Is More Than One Way To Do It). – It confuses people

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Uncategorized perly traits ● Perl one liners. – Everything in one line, seriously? – Not a clean language? – http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PerlGolf

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Why there're less newbies! ● Less Massive Open Online Courses for Perl – Only Udemy & Alison have Perl courses – Udacity, CourseEra have courses on Python, Ruby & Scala etc.

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Why there're less newbies! ● Less participation in internship programs – Perl participated twice in Google Summer of Code. – Perl participated four times in GNOME's Outreach Program for Women. – But we should probably have more of them.

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Why there're less newbies! ● Companies do not want to train new people – Well! This is a rather general fact, which applies to all languages. – Our company i.e. Booking.com does train new people :)

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& we are hiring (not only perl developers :)

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Why there're less newbies! ● We may not have not marketed well. ● People's interests are market driven – Python, PHP, Ruby,... are more popular than Perl in market. – Newbies tend to learn those languages instead of Perl.

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Why there're less newbies! ● No university teaches perl, they prefer python, SICP,... – Atleast, I've not seen any!

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Why there're less newbies! ● Less good examples to convince people to use the language

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Perl events ● OSCON – Started as a Perl conference :) – Now, Wikipedia says that “the amount of Perl content has continued to decline year over year”. ● Yet Another Perl Conference (YAPCs) ● FOSDEM ● Various PM meetups & workshops.

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Perl newbies at Perl events ● Some people who organize & attend Perl conferences say – We see quite a few newbies every year. – But we see most of them only once. – We don't have a problem attracting newbies. Our problem is with keeping the newbies.

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Why newbies go to perl conferences only once! ● They may not understand the content of talks! – It's very much possible that content of talks is very advanced. ● They may not like the community! ● I don't get any other reason(s) :(

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Want newbies in Perl conferences every year! ● Try to make your talks beginner friendly. ● Be friendly with newbies :).

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How can we bring more newbies to Perl ● By introducing Perl in various MOOCs. ● By organizing internship programs like Google Summer Of Code & GNOME's Outreach Program frequently. ● By talking about Perl at non-perl events – Tell them about advantages of Perl over other languages. – Tell them that Perl is not horrible at all. ● CPAN authors – Please document your modules in a newbie friendly manner!

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How can we bring more newbies to Perl ● By writing concise Perl tutorials – e.g. Tutorials on perlmaven.com ● By making newbies to stop following old Perl books – learn.perl.org still suggests a book written in 2000

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If you're a newbie & want to start with perl ● Start with any of these books – Beginning Perl by Curtis Ovid Poe – Modern Perl by Chromatic ● If you want to stay up to date with latest perl happenings – blogs.perl.org ● Many perl programmers post there. – Subscribe to Perl Weekly

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If you're a newbie (or may be even if you're not a newbie)

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Thanks to ● People who shared their opinions with me, a very long list! ● Two perl trainers who shared statistics of their perl courses. ● Chris Prather for reviewing initial versions of talk slides.