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.

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