Re: perl and marketing
Quoting Elaine -HFB- Ashton ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): Just like MIT to overengineer something :) If little kids in Finland can master Finnish, Swedish and English by the time they are 10, a programming language surely couldn't be that big of a deal. Learning Finnish much, much later in life isn't quite so easy :) I was very impressed one day when I learned that kids on Holland nowadays learn about the land of Oct in primary school, age 9-10. Where the people only count to 7. So they learn counting 0..7, oct, oct plus one, etc. Which is written down as 0..7, 10, 11, etc. So they learn to count in different bases. I think I only learned that at university. Teach 'm young. Cheers, -- Merijn Broeren | Sometime in the middle ages, God got fed up with us Software Geek | and put earth at sol.milky-way.univ in his kill-file. | Pray all you want, it just gets junked.
Re: perl and marketing
Merijn wrote: I was very impressed one day when I learned that kids on Holland nowadays learn about the land of Oct in primary school, age 9-10. aolMe too!/aol I was telling my wife about this just the other day. I was in the last year of junior school so also must have been about 9. Our teacher took us off on an imaginary rocket ship journey to a planet where the aliens only had 8 fingers. We learnt how to count in octal and convert between octal and decimal. I don't think too many of us really understood it in depth and only learnt to count/convert by rote. But I do remember being fascinated by the idea that 10 was an entirely arbitrary base for a number system. A
Re: perl and marketing
Andy Wardley wrote: Merijn wrote: I was very impressed one day when I learned that kids on Holland nowadays learn about the land of Oct in primary school, age 9-10. aolMe too!/aol aolMe three/aol I remeber being taught about conversion to and from HEX, Binary and Octal during my last year or so at Primary school. I'm sure our end of term production even included people who counted in a different base. Still remember the awful joke about having 1023 fingers. :| -- Chris Bannister [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: perl and marketing
On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 12:16:31PM +0100, Chris Bannister wrote: I remeber being taught about conversion to and from HEX, Binary and Octal during my last year or so at Primary school. I'm sure our end of term production even included people who counted in a different base. Still remember the awful joke about having 1023 fingers. :| I remember sitting with my dad learning binary aged 9/10 and how to count on my fingers to 1023. Being able to count, fast[1], to 31 on one hand is surprisingly useful. Then there's all the jokes about the number six (UK), four (US), ... Paul [1] 0 to 31 in about 6s -- Paul Makepeace ... http://paulm.com/ What is the time of your life? To move with certainty and purpose. -- http://paulm.com/toys/surrealism/
Re: perl and marketing
From: Merijn Broeren [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 8/19/03 8:53:49 AM I was very impressed one day when I learned that kids on Holland nowadays learn about the land of Oct in primary school, age 9-10. Where the people only count to 7. So they learn counting 0..7, oct, oct plus one, etc. Which is written down as 0..7, 10, 11, etc. So they learn to count in different bases. I think I only learned that at university. Teach 'm young. I'm sure I did stuff in different bases pretty early on in school. In fact, I _know_ that we much have at least touched on base 12 so that we could deal with the monetary system[1]. Dave... [1] Yes, I _am_ that old. -- http://www.dave.org.uk Let me see you make decisions, without your television - Depeche Mode (Stripped)
Re: perl and marketing
On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 11:53:42AM +0100, Andy Wardley wrote: Merijn wrote: I was very impressed one day when I learned that kids on Holland nowadays learn about the land of Oct in primary school, age 9-10. aolMe too!/aol I was telling my wife about this just the other day. I was in the last year of junior school so also must have been about 9. Our teacher took us off on an imaginary rocket ship journey to a planet where the aliens only had 8 fingers. All I got to do last year of primary school was sit in a corner with a copies of Martin Gardner's (More) Mathmatical Puzzles and Diversions. I'm feeling fantasy-deprived :-) The teacher had a story about the leprechauns that could count up to 1023 on their fingers, so I might have known what binary was too (though I don't remember binary being mentioned). -- Chris Benson
Re: perl and marketing
Dave Cross wrote: I'm sure I did stuff in different bases pretty early on in school. In fact, I _know_ that we much have at least touched on base 12 so that we could deal with the monetary system[1]. In France I remember doing bases 12, 24 and 60 quite young. I'll let you figure out for what it was used :) -- Robin Berjon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Research Engineer, Expwayhttp://expway.fr/ 7FC0 6F5F D864 EFB8 08CE 8E74 58E6 D5DB 4889 2488
Re: perl and marketing
On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 05:00:59AM -0700, Dave Cross wrote: I'm sure I did stuff in different bases pretty early on in school. In fact, I _know_ that we much have at least touched on base 12 so that we could deal with the monetary system. Speaking of which, the aforementioned Schoolhouse Rock had a segment on base twelve, so although school may not have done it, my generation did have an early introduction to bases other than 10. dha -- David H. Adler - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.panix.com/~dha/ Barter is if he asked someone to look at his program in exchange for a cow or something. - Mark-Jason Dominus
Re: perl and marketing
* Tony Bowden ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: On Sun, Aug 17, 2003 at 09:05:43AM +0100, Simon Wistow wrote: Does Perl need better PR? To what goal? Not having to justify the design decision of using Perl from first principles everytime in environments that do not currently use Perl. Greg -- Greg McCarroll http://www.mccarroll.org.uk/~gem/ jabber://[EMAIL PROTECTED] msn://[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: perl and marketing
On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 10:36:28AM +0100, Alex McLintock wrote: You might really say that this is a problem of Open Source as a whole. Its marketing really sucks. Double plus for Free Software. Sell the benefit - not the technology. So how does that apply to perl? what could anyone do differently now which hasn't been done over the last five years? Does that apply to _anything_? I'm not sure it sells cars. Apart from a passing nod to safety, independent traction control, four-wheel drive etc. is all sold on the basis of 'cool'. PCs - they sell on the basis of GHz, Gbs, etc. Bigger, faster, cooler. I can't really think of anything which sells on actual benefits (apart from in an indirect manner - this CPU goes faster, so get your processing done faster - which isn't really true anyway). Sell the technology I say ;) Cheers, Alex.
Re: perl and marketing
On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 10:45:37AM +0100, Alex Hudson wrote: On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 10:36:28AM +0100, Alex McLintock wrote: You might really say that this is a problem of Open Source as a whole. Its marketing really sucks. Double plus for Free Software. Sell the benefit - not the technology. So how does that apply to perl? what could anyone do differently now which hasn't been done over the last five years? Does that apply to _anything_? I'm not sure it sells cars. Apart from a passing nod to safety, independent traction control, four-wheel drive etc. is all sold on the basis of 'cool'. PCs - they sell on the basis of GHz, Gbs, etc. Bigger, faster, cooler. I can't really think of anything which sells on actual benefits (apart from in an indirect manner - this CPU goes faster, so get your processing done faster - which isn't really true anyway). This will save you money and reduce your hardware expenditure due to increased efficiency. Now why does that sound so much like a Dilbert quote? Sell the technology I say ;) Sell the children, I say. Alex. /joel
Re: perl and marketing
Joel Bernstein [EMAIL PROTECTED] quoth: * *Sell the children, I say. Well, you know.years ago I suggested that there be a series of Perl for kids cartoons with jingles in the vein of School House Rock [ www.schoolhouserock.com ] which were educational cartoons shown on saturday mornings with the regular cartoons. 30 years later I can still remember every lyric and every tune [ listen to some of the clips and you'll understand...even Jarkko found lolly,lolly,lolly... to be viciously addictive. Someday someone might even take my idea seriously :) Like Mr. Peabody teaches fork()... http://www.geeksalad.org/odds/fork/all.shtml Press releases are uninteresing and dull, dull, dulldo something interesting and they will come :) e.
Re: perl and marketing
On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 06:09:31AM -0500, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote: Well, you know.years ago I suggested that there be a series of Perl for kids cartoons with jingles in the vein of School House Rock [ www.schoolhouserock.com ] which were educational cartoons shown on saturday mornings with the regular cartoons. 30 years later I can still remember every lyric and every tune [ listen to some of the clips and you'll understand...even Jarkko found lolly,lolly,lolly... to be viciously addictive. Someday someone might even take my idea seriously :) To this day I cannot recite the preamble to the US constitution without singing it. I remember being in school wishing they had done the Gettysburg address too, since I had to memorize both in the same grading period in school. Too bad that not all of the songs they added for the DVD were up to the same quality. I still wish I had the parody from the Simpsons about how a constitutional amendment is passed. -- mike
Re: perl and marketing
On Monday, August 18, 2003, at 01:00 pm, Mike Jarvis wrote:
On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 06:09:31AM -0500, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote:
Well, you know.years ago I suggested that there be a series of
Perl
for kids cartoons with jingles in the vein of School House Rock [
www.schoolhouserock.com ] which were educational cartoons shown on
saturday mornings with the regular cartoons. 30 years later I can
still
remember every lyric and every tune [ listen to some of the clips and
you'll understand...even Jarkko found lolly,lolly,lolly... to be
viciously addictive. Someday someone might even take my idea
seriously :)
To this day I cannot recite the preamble to the US constitution
without singing it. I remember being in school wishing they had done
the Gettysburg address too, since I had to memorize both in the same
grading period in school.
Hell, you guys have hit gold here!
So we all quit our day-jobs and infiltrate the primary schools where we
can influence the fresh minds of young children! Start the day with
Larry's prayer... Teach them Maths by way of the scalar (and Math::*,
of course). Then an English lesson in a Perlish way:
my Dog $spot;
see( $spot-run );
pet $spot if $spot-can( 'roll_over' );
And hoo-boy, Music class would be such fun with great songs like:
foreach $little_piggy (in( our @pig_pen )) {
roast $little_piggy;
eat $little_piggy;
isnt( $little_piggy, GOOD, 'yum yum!' );
}
That should put us on par with the American constitution. The
unfortunate side-effect is that this new breed of coder might not
shut-up while coding. (but hey, that's what headphones are for, no?)
Of course, not everybody will be able to join the schools because we'll
need some torch bearers to carry the flame for the next 10 years or so
until the kids are old enough to sign contracts...
But fear not, there's still work to do! As Elaine rightly suggests, we
need to infiltrate the Cartoon industry too! We'll get Barney teaching
pre-schoolers Perl, and the tele-tubbies with random CPAN-module
listings on their tummies! The power-puff girls fighting crime with
powerbooks leaving a coloured trail of sigils wherever they go, and I'm
sure we could twist 'Pikachu' into 'Perl4you' or something. As for
Dexter's Lab? Well, the writers aren't far-off the mark anyway, I'm
sure it won't take much convincing.
The greatest thing about all this targeted marketing will be the
side-effects - kids asking their parents if they can code Perl. You
know, the pressure that marketing puts on parents is phenomenal...
we'll have them coding Perl in no time!
-Steve
Re: perl and marketing
Steve Purkis [EMAIL PROTECTED] quoth: * *The greatest thing about all this targeted marketing will be the *side-effects - kids asking their parents if they can code Perl. You *know, the pressure that marketing puts on parents is phenomenal... *we'll have them coding Perl in no time! You laugh...but I'll bet since you're a gen-X-er that you can rattle off at least 10 commercial jingles from your childhood :) Read http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375407502/ and laugh no more :) Marketing to children certainly isn't new. Get 'em hooked while they're young and before they've turned into language zealots. e.
Re: perl and marketing
On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 07:09:48AM +0100, Greg McCarroll wrote: Does Perl need better PR? To what goal? Not having to justify the design decision of using Perl from first principles everytime in environments that do not currently use Perl. I think that's too broad a goal. The target audience is too wide, and have too many reasons to not use Perl to make this a viable target. Tony
Re: perl and marketing
On Monday, August 18, 2003, at 02:30 pm, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote: Steve Purkis [EMAIL PROTECTED] quoth: * *The greatest thing about all this targeted marketing will be the *side-effects - kids asking their parents if they can code Perl. You *know, the pressure that marketing puts on parents is phenomenal... *we'll have them coding Perl in no time! You laugh...but I'll bet since you're a gen-X-er that you can rattle off at least 10 commercial jingles from your childhood :) I laughed and cringed while writing that.. I'm a few years short of gen-X, but you're absolutely right - I can remember the commercial jingles. And I know that's the way marketing works... increase demand for something by painting pretty pictures in peoples heads about why they need it. Cartoons are entertainment.. kids need to be entertained... Perl needs to be sold. It kinda disgusts and impresses me at the same time. I guess it's the truth in it that makes it funny. Read http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375407502/ and laugh no more :) Looks interesting.. -Steve
Re: perl and marketing
On Mon, 18 Aug 2003, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote: Press releases are uninteresing and dull, dull, dulldo something interesting and they will come :) I am not sure if that is interesting or if it makes sense but if there were some (educational ?) games in Perl that school kids could play and then hack around the code. Lately I thought about LOGO. Is it still used ? Would it be interesting to create a LOGO implementation in Perl ? and while writing this mail I searched for LOGO a bit and found this site about YoYo - Java for kids. http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/projects/bongo/ Gabor
Re: perl and marketing
Alex Hudson wrote: On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 10:36:28AM +0100, Alex McLintock wrote: You might really say that this is a problem of Open Source as a whole. Its marketing really sucks. Double plus for Free Software. Similarly and earlier, Leon Brocard wrote: [Perl PR] needs people to just do it. The right place for this discussion is the perl advocacy mailing list ... I find Mark Dominus's points - http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2000/12/advocacy.html - very persuasive (summary: advocacy can easily decend into a tribal Perl rocks, $WHATEVER sucks, which is neither persusasive, nor good for a language such as Perl, which improves by borrowing solutions from other languages). Sell the benefit - not the technology. Does that apply to _anything_? I'm not sure it sells cars. Apart from a passing nod to safety, independent traction control, four-wheel drive etc. is all sold on the basis of 'cool'. True. But cars are a particularly sharp example of that, in my opinion. Take a look around you on the tube - adverts seem to fall fairly cleanly into a number of approaches to selling products. - Price. Some airlines, insurance companies, telcos get your attention by claiming to be able to do something very cheaply or easily. - Because it works. (Or because claiming it works is part of the placebo effect). - By making the brand, or the product seem cool, or something to aspire to. - By making the product a badge of membership of some tribe/subculture/whatever - Humour, or ironically knocking the idea of a brand as a badge. And so on, until the marketing guys get bored. I believe some of these approaches are relatively novel (ie. have become popular since the mid 70s - I gather that the public got bored with lots of increasingly-transparent 'this product will make you a beautiful person with a yacht'). The trouble with PR is that people start to ignore you. You may find yourself having to be more subtle and sinister. Or turn though 180 degrees, and be more honest. (See http://www.rickross.com/reference/cults_in_our_midst/cults_in_our_midst2.html ) Habits of payware software that Open Source people seem diabolically keen to imitate: 1. Buzzwords. Content management system is a favourite, which seems taggable onto virtually any system regardless of functionality. Assets as umbrella term for nonplaintext-content (typically .jpg/.pdf/etc) is truely Orwellian - on most sites, the graphics are NOT the key assets, they are decorative. 2. Huge products. M$ does very well (?) making word processors that need unthinkable computer power to operate, then monopolising them. It is doubtful whether economies of scale operate the same way for open source. (a) small pieces, loosely integrated. Like the Internet/WWW. *NOT* like Prestel or minitel. More topically, *NOT* like the American mains grid on the eastern seabord (; (b) With open source, you don't HAVE to do everything the user wants. If you make it possible for people to add and maintain extensions, this is potentially much more powerful. 3. Systems that abruptly screech to a halt, and ask you to confirm things with irritating little popup boxes. ... Cheers Ti
Re: perl and marketing
Tim Sweetman wrote: Alex Hudson wrote: On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 10:36:28AM +0100, Alex McLintock wrote: You might really say that this is a problem of Open Source as a whole. Its marketing really sucks. Double plus for Free Software. Similarly and earlier, Leon Brocard wrote: [Perl PR] needs people to just do it. The right place for this discussion is the perl advocacy mailing list ... I find Mark Dominus's points - http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2000/12/advocacy.html - very persuasive (summary: advocacy can easily decend into a tribal Perl rocks, $WHATEVER sucks, which is neither persusasive, nor good for a language such as Perl, which improves by borrowing solutions from other languages). Sell the benefit - not the technology. Does that apply to _anything_? snip/ According to the book I've read about marketing[0], customers make purchasing decisions based on perceived benefits (rational or otherwise) as opposed to features. example If you used Perl you could use the Foo module from CPAN (feature). Your script would take 5 minutes to write (benefit) and you could take the rest of the day off (benefit). /example From what I understand of the other book I've read about marketing[1] the Interweb has broken a lot of the 'broadcast' marketing model (but probably not the benefit selling bit). The perl community were/are probably pioneers in the gonzo approach to marketing. IMHO as most Perl advocacy takes place online, anything much more formal wouldn't produce many, er, benefits. $0.02 [0] http://tinyurl.com/kent [1] http://tinyurl.com/keoa -- Paul Sharpe Tel: 619 523 0100 Fax: 619 523 0101 Russell Sharpe, Inc mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 4993 Niagara Avenue, Suite 209 http://www.russellsharpe.com/ San Diego, CA 92107-3185
Re: perl and marketing
Gabor Szabo [EMAIL PROTECTED] quoth: * *I am not sure if that is interesting or if it makes sense but if there were *some (educational ?) games in Perl that school kids could play and then *hack around the code. Well, see, the cool thing about School House Rock, especially Grammar Rock and Science Rock was that it took a bunch of fundamental stuff about language or science, made it entertaining and set it to an infectiously viral tune. Getting kids interested by showing them what they can do would likely be appealing. Press releases from yet another open source vector on yet another same old topic is really stale...but a project getting kids involved might get some media interest as well as developing a customer base and developers for the future before they have too much stuff to unlearn or fried all their neurons on single malts. :) *and while writing this mail I searched for LOGO a bit and found this *site about YoYo - Java for kids. *http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/projects/bongo/ Just like MIT to overengineer something :) If little kids in Finland can master Finnish, Swedish and English by the time they are 10, a programming language surely couldn't be that big of a deal. Learning Finnish much, much later in life isn't quite so easy :) e.
Re: perl and marketing
Simon Wistow sent the following bits through the ether: Does Perl need better PR? No, it needs people to just do it. The right place for this discussion is the perl advocacy mailing list, which seems to be fairly quiet. FWIW The Ponie press release got sent on the Canon PR newswire and targeted at various journalists and we still failed to get any major writeups. http://opensource.fotango.com/ponie/ponie-pr.html Leon -- Leon Brocard.http://www.astray.com/ scribot.http://www.scribot.com/ ... This is abuse. Arguments are down the hall
Re: perl and marketing
On Sun, Aug 17, 2003 at 09:05:43AM +0100, Simon Wistow wrote: Does Perl need better PR? To what goal? Tony
Re: perl and marketing
On Sun, Aug 17, 2003 at 10:10:34AM +0100, Leon Brocard wrote: FWIW The Ponie press release got sent on the Canon PR newswire and targeted at various journalists and we still failed to get any major writeups. What sort of writeups were you expecting / hoping for? I'd say the number of people outside the Perl community to whom this story is interesting is miniscule... Tony
