Our motivations
As the blurb on the Start Here page says: “This site is devoted to spreading the perl meme and to providing an easy place to find complete, working examples of good perl code“, but what are
our underlying motivations?
Documentation
Perl is already a well-documented language, so why create a site like
perlmeme.org? Our principle motivation is that we believe that perl is
seriously undersold in the marketplace of contemporary development languages.
In our experience as developers, we cannot imagine another language
that delivers the robustness and expressive power of Perl, whilst at the same
time offering the commercial advantage of being able to freely leverage
the treasure trove of high-quality software that can be found at
CPAN.
Like other Open Source success stories, such as the Apache web server,
Perl lacks the marketing clout of a major corporate owner, and like Apache,
Perl has been wildly successful despite this.
However Perl usage could be an order of magnitude higher even
than it is today. In many respects, the main barrier to this is sheer
ignorance of the richness of the Perl environment. And to some extent this
is understandable, if your entire exposure has been to proprietary
languages owned by single corporations, then you are no doubt steeped in
the memes that come with those environments:
Your interests are best protected by a single, large vendor
That vendor controls all the development in the language
The vendor charts the future course of the language, (often at a
quite glacial pace when compared to the enhancement cycle of
Open Source languages)
That vendors’ marketing department champions the language, and
frequently spends signicant efforts instilling FUD about other
environments, to make sure that you don’t stray too far from the path
they have set for you.
In contrast, Open Source languages like Perl:
Are owned by the community that develops them,
Are heavily used by large corporate environments, but since there is
no incentive to advertise this, the exent of this market penetration
is not obvious from the outside
The community has strong involvement in the future course of the
language, and the rate of change and innovation in the development
of the language has no analogue in the proprietary world.
There is no marketing department to champion the langauge. And if
marketing department derived … is your only source of information
about development languages, (and for many people it is), then you
would be excused for missing the Perl cluetrain when it pulled it at
your station…
This site aims to attract interest and repeat visits from people who are
new to Perl, as well as to do things to address the many irrational
anti-Perl memes that people must contend with when they wish to adopt Perl
as a heavy duty development environment.
If prospective developers are attracted to Perl’s immense power, and the
promise of Perl 6, yet are distracted by Perl FUD that has little or no
substance, then all the documentation and quality software in the world will
not help. What is needed is a concerted effort to address and eliminate
these sources of misinformation and to provide a resource that will help
devleopers used to other environments come up to speed in Perl.
Eyeballs
If, like us, you’re tired of having your online content overloaded
with advertisements, then we hope you’ll find perlmeme.org a refreshing
change. One of our early design motivations was to provide a site with
no advertising graphics at all.
We don’t believe that there’s anything wrong with advertising per se, but we
just want to provide an online reference site that has no advertising,
where you’re free to concentrate on the content.
Offline resource
We also want to provide a resource that can be installed on a local
server, or on your laptop, and for this reason, we will (soon) make the
whole site available for you to download form our
sourceforge project home page
– Simon Taylor