use Perl

I think we can/should/will (improve Perl 5), but meanwhile we must learn to live with the shortcomings it has. No language or environment is perfect. This wouldn't be a problem, unless clueless people start to believe the FUD arising from this self criticism.

I really wouldn't like to distract the focus from Perl 6 since it will be a great step forward for the whole world of programming, but there are success stories written all the time with Perl 5. Not seeing this and appreciating it alienates unaware people and future audience of Perl 6.

But I thought we agree on this, so maybe I didn't get your point? Sorry. ;-)

Catalyst has some builtin PAR support.

They're not dead/dying but sometimes they think life stops, unless/until Perl get the best OO model, easiest deployment, best libraries and so on, and so on. They're just so demanding to their selfs.

Yes. I think JFDI can not apply here. I (or preferably anybody else from the community with some visual design talent) could easily prepare a new layout for this site, for example (yes, there is one proposal in this discussion thread also), but I don't see it's possible to just prepare a complete new marketing strategy for *.perl.org and send it to a webmaster (or volunteer him/her self to make the changes).

What I'm thinking about is a complete "rewrite" of the public appearance of TPF and the community as a whole. Most visible part is to modernize the *.perl.org sites, starting from the visual appearance but also content and everything has to be organized better. I think this is preparing for the Perl 6, since we need the audience and should start building the premises for that. Looking from this perspective, couldn't some part of the Ian Hague grants used for this purpose?

I'm also starting to realize that discussing this on the comments of some journal entries is not the best way. Discussion gets very easily distracted and it's very hard to follow it. Is there a mailinglist or another forum that should be used? I see that there's a lot a interest for this makeover to happen, but people get very easily lost..

I will volunteer my self, but my first task is to understand how TPF makes this kind of decisions and what kind of commitment it is possible to get. What do you suggest?

I will also donate some money to TPF, if there is a way to earmark it for this purpose. And it really can not be "just a facelift" for perl.org -- there's also a lot of content work (writing) to be done, where every perl blogger, book author and other pro writers could participate.

This site, as the semi-official (?) discussion platform of the community should be part of the scope also. If this (the status of this and other sites) is unclear, such issues must be solved.

Yes, and Perl 6 will be a major milestone in the history of interpreted languages.

However, my feeling is that the Perl community is now lacking entry- and mid-level users in "new" application areas like Web development. I don't see the language details as the problem here.

People are looking for CMS:s, modern MVC frameworks, good looking friendly sites, easy to find documentation, exciting examples and a consistent presence in the web. All can be done with Perl, all has been done with Perl, but people just can't see it. I think www.perl.org is a key issue here. That's a bare minimum!

Every Linux distribution has Perl installed by default, all Apache stuff is there, CPAN is full of recently updated modules. Everything is there, ready to rock! We just have a bad image, crappy web sites and maybe concentrate too much into academic discussion about language features. That discussion and development is important and I see you guys doing wonderful work there, but as a whole, this is not serving the potential new users as much as we should be. It's not your fault, I'm just inviting new and old people to participate into this effort.