Better Perl

[Zbigniew Lukasiak]

On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 2:58 PM, Aaron Trevena <aaron.trevena at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 04/04/2008, Zbigniew Lukasiak <zzbbyy at gmail.com> wrote:
>  > This starts to be circular.
>
>  Not really.
>
>  First you said perl was dead for web startups because nobody else was
>  using it one meeting of self-selecting web 2.0 muppets.
>
>  Then you said that other languages are breaking into new fields but
>  couldn't back it up when I pointed out that you were wrong.

I was answering an email stating that maybe Perl is not number one in
new web stuff - but it is big in the established business.  So you see
it was not my claim that you fighted.

>
>
>  >  what this thread started with was me
>  >  trying to assess Perl popularity among web startups - I still have not
>  >  yet seen any sample better than mine - so I'll stay with my conclusion
>  >  that Perl does not do well in web frameworks.
>
>  Define your criteria - I'm pretty impressed with Perl's frameworks -
>  there isn't a CMS that I'd pick in Perl, but none in any other
>  language that I'd use either. Fortunately I haven't done that in a
>  long while so I'm not concerned.
>
>
>  >  If you have any idea how to improve this discussion so that it does
>  >  not go in circles - then I'll be grateful.
>
>  Learning to trim quotes and sigs would be good ;)
>
>  I could also suggest you look harder for perl startups - wibbling on
>  perl monks and expecting them to beat a path to your posting isn't
>  exactly a serious effort.
>

Looking for perl starups will not give you a good sample to compare
relative use of languages. The idea is to have a representative
sample.  There is sound methodology at Tim Bounce's page - and it
shows that overall Perl is still big - but when talking about the
future of the language I would like to see a similar statistics but
narrowed to only startups (and/or younger people).

I can agree with you that a random Y-Combinator event for startups can
be biased - but I have not seen any better sample here.  Propose a
sampling methodology and we can discuss.  There are many startup
meetings - BarCamp, Geektails, WikiMonday (you have links to their web
pages in my PM post) - we can discuss about them if someone gather the
statistics.  Or you can choose some other sampling methodology - but
without it it is just contest on how many companies we remember.


>  Come back when you have a survey to match Kirrily Robert's recent one.

I'll have a look at it. It's usage for language popularity comparison
is limited by the fact that it is only about Perl - but it is possible
that you can use it to compare the number of Perl startups to the
number of overall Perl companies.

-- 
Zbigniew Lukasiak
http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/