Re: Putting Perl Back on Top in the Fields of Scientific and Financial Computing

I'd like to throw a question back at you.

There is a long mile between knowing what ought to happen and making it actually happen. Key elements of marketing are knowing your target audience and understanding how best to get their attention. If you were to plan out a public relations campaign for the scientific/financial community, how would you go about it?

What messages or stories would get attention and interest? Journal articles? Case studies? Here's "how I made it work" essays?
Is bling or coolness needed? Fancy graphics and jingles? Ipod touch/ipad apps?
Where would they have to be placed? blogs? newsgroups? portals? word of mouth?
Who would have to deliver the message? Are there big names people trust? Who are they? How would you get them to want to talk about how great Perl is?

Comment on Re: Putting Perl Back on Top in the Fields of Scientific and Financial Computing

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Re^2: Putting Perl Back on Top in the Fields of Scientific and Financial Computing by hermida (Scribe) on Mar 06, 2011 at 22:11 UTC
If you were to plan out a public relations campaign for the scientific/financial community, how would you go about it? Hi there, not sure if this reply was to ask post author. What I asked myself a while ago was "how did Python and the NumPy/SciPy/matplotlib stack become popular in these communities?" The first thing that's vital is to have great tools and libraries available that cover most if not all needs and are easy to install and easy to integrate together. For example some people have said that PDL's integrated plotting libraries PGPLOT and PLplot are not as good as the competitors. This can be fairly easily improved and we've talked about it on the PDL mailing list. Perl R integration using Statistics::R is not nearly as complete an interface as say RPy2 and I've mentioned that to the maintainer. People on PDL also have been discussing making a full-fledged wxPerl PDL IDE with embedded plotting which would be a awesome for PDL and the knowledge to do most of it is already there from the Padre community. With the tools and libraries there and easy to install and use then it's about communicating to the scientific and financial communities that you have a stack that is as good if not better than the competitors and what advantages your stack has. This can happen organically without need for direct communication if you have great tools, a la "if you build it they will come", people start using it and telling others, etc.	[reply]
Re^2: Putting Perl Back on Top in the Fields of Scientific and Financial Computing by educated_foo (Vicar) on Mar 06, 2011 at 01:30 UTC
Make people's jobs easier. Remember how Perl became popular? Sysadmins wanted to write scripts, and Perl was better than SH. Then people wanted to make web pages, and Perl plus CGI made that much easier. Write packages that make people's lives much easier, then publish them. For example, do some research good enough to get into a top journal, use Perl to do it, and release your code. No, that's not easy, but true, lasting success never has been.	[reply]


Think about Loose Coupling
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