[Adam Clark, on Thu, 25 May 2000]
:: Hope nobody minds a newbie perspective on this.
::
:: I spent the last 4 years programming (and unabashedly loving) Perl, and I
:: don't think adding Perl to Zope will attract a lot more people. The large
:: scope of Zope and the similarities between Python and Perl mean that I've spent
:: a whole lot more time struggling with the Zope pieces than with Python.
::
:: What makes me most uncomfortable about this is the opportunity
:: cost. Every hour of development time integrating Perl is one less hour
:: working on other parts. I can say without any reservation that the lack
:: of documentation has done ten times as much as lack of Perl support to
:: make my time with Zope difficult.
Of course there is simply no way to measure how many people have
silently left the fold after failing to make sense of Zope, but I feel
comfortable surmising that the number is at least an order of
magnitude greater than the number of those who have somehow stuck with
Zope. Unfortunately, those lost early adopters are unlikely to ever try
again. A high percentage of those giving up in frustration are probably
high end professionals, simply too busy to consider learning Zope by
trial and error or by studying the source code.
The documentation woes have been aired on this list at length, ad
infinitum, ad absurdum. Yet we remain woeful. Had the documentation
been brought up to par some time ago (say around the time of the 2.0
release), then I doubt that the Zope community would now feel any need
or desire to embrace the Perl (or any other) user community in order to
gain support for Zope. There would be such a multitude of productive
Zope users and contributors by now that the need for Perl libraries
would be nonexistent. That kind of success and momentum in itself would
do more than anything to attract Perl users to Zope and Python.
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