I am pretty new to Perl - will have 2 years in August 2012 - and I am in love with it. From those 2 years, I spent 8 months on a project which although was written in Perl, was in maintenance mode and I didn't have to code too much.
I feel guilty and some kind of selfish because I don't have a short list of stuff that, showing to other developers would persuade them into start using Perl and finally making them reach the euphoria and Zen that we, the Perl Monks, have.
Having read Gabor Szabo's post I recalled to create this teasing short list of stuff that Perl will offer you.
So, if I were to create a Perl promotional presentation (a thing I hope I'll be get the time to do in the near future ) I'd go like below
The Structure of the Promo Presentation
- don't delve too deep into the syntax and only show the different type of variables that Perl has.
- reference some of the many freely available Perl Tutorials
- show some easy to understand yet useful Perl one-liners. Get inspired from this list
- introduce the often imitated(ruby gems, python's PyPI) but never duplicated CPAN
Go on with practical, hands on stuff
- the law mandates a scraping example in absolutely every Perl presentation
- going with yet another Perl trend setter WWW::Mechanize is a safe bet
- scrape the site in parallel with Parallel::ForkManager and your audience will start salivating
- keep the coolness on the ascending trend and include a demo of how straight forward it is to integrate popular services - for example the Google Spreadsheets API, with Net::Google::Spreadsheets
- you could create a Spreadsheet form and use your Perl script to give an aggregated overview of the answers
After showing the above, your audience should be pretty convinced that Perl has a great power as a backend language - now it's time to show them how they can glue all of those components, package them beautifully and deliver great products:
- take the above Spreadsheet integration and wrap it in a Mojolicious or Dancer web application - no need for webserver configuration, filehandler settings in Apache or other time consuming setup tasks
- you could use the Mojolicious Boilerplate in order to have out of the box neat and shiny, production ready web application
At the end of the presentation if the people in the room are not coming to you like
to ask for that list of Perl Tutorials, they should be suggested that a career in flipping burgers at McDonalds might be a viable alternative for them.
Conclusion
We are all hurried people, we are all in shortage of time and besides that, unfortunately, for many of us learning new stuff is done when we are out of school. What will motivate a person in taking action and learn something new, is something that will offer sex, fame, money or power.
Giving a concise, easy to follow presentation, emphasizing the short path from idea to the final product will help your audience become more productive, helping them to spend less time coding and more time innovating and who knows, maybe when they'll achieve success, they'll have a job offer for you as a CTO, so talk to as many people as possible about the awesome Perl ecosystem.
What do you think are the characteristics of a highly efficient Perl Teasing Presentation?
PS: I managed to help myself from using the word Awesome, although I was tempted to in almost each phrase
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