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How to bring newbies to perl?

How to bring newbies to perl?

Upasana

June 08, 2015
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Transcript

  1. 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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  2. The culprit!

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  3. 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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  4. 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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  5. Who's a newbie?

    Someone doing perl programming for 3 or less than 3
    years.

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  6. 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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  7. 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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  8. 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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  9. 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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  10. 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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  11. Why people left Perl!

    Bad reputation of older perl language
    – Web development was a pain

    CGI

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  12. No easy way of doing OOP

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  13. 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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  14. 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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  15. But now, it has changed

    For web development
    – Catalyst.
    – Mojolicious, Dancer, AMON.

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  16. 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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  17. PERL COMMUNITY IS NOT
    BAD AT ALL

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  18. Our good things

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  19. Our good things

    Great support for text-processing

    ack

    Request Tracker

    Bugzilla

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  20. Our good things

    CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network)

    Friendly & helpful community.

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  21. Our good things

    Multi-purpose language
    – Web development
    – System administration
    – Desktop applications

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

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  23. Our bad things

    Good CMS
    – blogs.perl.org is a good example of it

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  24. Our bad things

    Our website
    – No success stories
    – Really old look
    – No REPL

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  25. Uncategorized perly traits

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

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  26. 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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  27. 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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  28. 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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  29. 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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  30. & we are hiring
    (not only perl developers :)

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  31. 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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  32. Why there're less newbies!

    No university teaches perl, they prefer python, SICP,...
    – Atleast, I've not seen any!

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  33. Why there're less newbies!

    Less good examples to convince people to use the
    language

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  34. 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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  35. 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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  36. 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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  37. Want newbies in Perl conferences every year!

    Try to make your talks beginner friendly.

    Be friendly with newbies :).

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  38. 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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  39. 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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  40. 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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  41. If you're a newbie (or may be
    even if you're not a newbie)

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  44. 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.

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  45. Thanks for your time!

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  46. Questions?

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