As a result of YAPC::NA 10, I was inspired to get more involved in Social Media. The idea is to promote and learn about new technologies through Social Media while injecting a sane, intelligent under current of Modern Perl.
I finally started to use my Twitter account. I’ve noticed the majority of tweets regarding Perl refer to it as torturous or antiquated or both. These tweets are not coming from the Perl echo-chamber of Perl Monks, Perl Mongers, and Perl Conference attendees, but from programmers exposed to Perl against their will. This leaves a bad taste in their mouth, and when they hear “Perl,” their frame of reference is sadly the Matt’s Scripts Era of Perl Development.
I’m using TweetDeck, and I’ve created a search column for “perl.” It gets a decent amount of traffic everyday. I don’t have the time to respond to or even read every tweet about Perl, but I skim them maybe 4 or 5 times a day to find people with Perl problems or Perl frustration and point them in a better direction. If you’re comfortable providing this type of assistance, I’d recommend TweetDeck with the “perl” Search Column as an interesting way to proselytize for Perl. It does mean you’ll be subjected to the occasional teen ranting about “Perl Jam,” and of course you’ll likely writhe in agony at the number of times you see Perl referred to as “PERL.” But if enough of the echo chamber is inundating the Twitterverse with intelligent, modern Perl advice, we might gain even more traction in the Social Media arena.
If you do tweet about Perl, follow HashTags and tag your tweet with “#perl“.
Just a thought, as I haven’t been able to hack in Perl in a few weeks due to other more pressing issues.
{ 7 } Comments
I’m in the process of replying to people in a similar fashion to you (with tweetdeck and searching on Perl). This is something that the Perl Foundation PR committee will be building on going forward. My plan is to allow multiple people to have access to the @perlfoundation Twitter account to answer questions as they arise, or post positive information/events about Perl. This will show that the Perl Foundation and language is alive and active.
If you’re interested in being part of this, let me know.
Dan Magnuszewski
@magnachef
I’ve just started storing the data from a Perl Twitter search. I’ll be trying to do some kind of analysis later.
See http://perlhacks.com/2009/09/perl-twitter-feed.php for more details.
Awesome idea. I’m putting it to work.
I actually ran through the perl twitter stream yesterday using the technique described in this paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10902-009-9150-9
Your impression of antiquity/negativity seems incorrect, of the 1511 tweets I retreived that mention Perl, 312 contain “emotional words”. Of these, 77.2% contain positive language, and 22.7% contain negative language.
Yeah, thanks for trying to push Perl forward on Twitter, I tweet a lot on Perl and usually follow the perl search too. My suggestion is, don’t take it too serious and only respond to people that look to be worth of hearing you, otherwise, yeah just don’t sweat it.
The people who complain about languages are usually the ones who have no clue what they are doing. C is better, Perl is better, Python is the best. Quit your whining or go do something else.
The absolute worst argument (not Perl specific) is the “my language performs better than yours”. You can write some halfway decent Perl code that would outperform code written in c by some yutz who just got his BS in “Information Technology” *shudder*.
Code is only as good as the developer who created it.
If the code sucks; it’s not the language jackass, it’s YOU.
Sorry, I seem to be full of all kinds of hate today.