When talking about developers the mostly requested experinces were these:

Facebook developer
Drupal and/or PHP
Django and/or Python
Android meaning Java
iPhone meaning Objective C

And I have to admit that my experiences from similar meetings are very close to this. Now we can filter out Android and iPhone – because this is certainly out of reach. What is left is

1. Facebook. A friend of mine who works in marketing has been nagging me for a long time to start writing simple apps for Facebook, apparently the market for them is exploding. Unfortunately when I tried WWW::Facebook::API – it did not work for me, most probably because of a recent Facebook API upgrade. I’ve contacted the author and he is looking for a replacement, Facebook is changing the API constantly and he cannot keep up (his current work is not Facebook related). I think this is symptomatic – Perl tools, whole CPAN and web hosting with Perl is not aimed at such ‘simple apps’. Developers like to talk about huge sites like Amazon that use Perl, but the market share of such sites is tiny when you compare it to the market share for ‘simple apps’ – long tail, low-end disruptive innovation ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology) et all.

2. Drupal – same case, easy to start with tool. With minimal upstart costs you can have a ‘social site’ to market your product. In Perl word the analogy could be WebGUI – but hosting experiences are dramatically different.

3. Django – yeah I know – Catalyst. I cannot make the comparison here as I don’t know Django much (but I do have much criticism for Catalyst – otherwise I would not have started WebNano).

Right now, my impression is that the upper bits have reached a level of maturity that they don’t need as much attention (read: bugfixes, features, coding) any more, and that the 5%/10%/whatever% of attention that is freed could be used for solving Real World problems.

I have no illusions that Perl and it’s communities and ecosystem ever will be “finished” (much in the same way the english language never will be “finished”) but if we start spending some time the Real problems, we’ll both get the opportuntiy of helping people and show off Perl to the same people and others.

Having said that, I’m (almost painfully) aware that the 4th chain ($TOOL_THAT_INCREASES_AWARENESS) is where you find most businesses today. This might mean 1) it’s difficult to recruit volunteers, since they might already be employed, and 2) if one succeeds anyway, there’s probably a business opportunity somewhere there

BTW a link to this was posted to SF.pm and there was a nice example for some real world usage of Perl: http://mail.pm.org/pipermail/sanfrancisco-pm/2010-July/003037.html