Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

The business case for Perl 6

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Perl 6 is about value creation, and value creation is a product of [people solving problems] and [efficiency of tools used to solve these problems] — effort * efficiency.

For a while the focus in the Perl 6 community has been on increasing efficiency, and mostly by improving expressiveness and efficient use of programmer attention. This has lead to powerful constructs like grammars, junctions, roles, a wonderful type system and the tests that go with that – both for making sure the features work as intended and that they can be used in a sensible manner.

The cool thing here is that these features work as a “community size force multiplier.” For people to be attracted to a tool, they need to see it’s more efficient than it’s competitors. Efficient in learnability, expressiveness, utility, execution and fun. Right now, Perl 6 has reached a level of interestingness that makes it extremely well suited for hype, and with Rakudo Star on the horizon (Q2 2010) I’m expecting the Perl 6 buzz to increase a lot. The force multiplyer is about to kick in. :)

Better features -> More buzz -> Bigger community -> Stronger business case.

When it comes to business case, language popularity is the prime driver. When someone needs to hire people, availability of these people is paramount. Bad code can be fixed, but not hiring that programmer is so much more expensive than having to fix bad code. So if one should look at the skills market today (with so very few people in the world knowing Perl 6) the business case for it is almost non-existant.

With this in mind, I’m still very happy to see the Perl 6 crowd taking the long view and create an incredibly cool language instead of just focusing on a tiny feature set and then creating buzz. The buzz will come all by itself, and when it does, Perl 6’s awesome force multiplier will kick in and the fun will really begin.

Perl 6 might be small right now, but I’d say the outlook for Perl 6 is nothing less than spectacular. :)