In The “M” Word, I listed many of the things that have happened in the Perl marketing world over the last year. I wanted to end the year by mentioning a few people without whom this project would not have got off the ground at all.

• Curtis “Ovid” Poe started writing about Perl’s image issues on his use.perl journal back in July. But he didn’t just write about it. He chaired the Marketing BOF that we held in Lisbon and he was the driving force behind setting up the TPF marketing committee. He has also been instrumental in getting the blogs.perl.org site up and running.
• Gábor Szabó wasn’t very far behind Ovid in starting to blog about marketing. He has also been vociferous in TPF marketing committee discussions. He always has another idea for projects we can take on and often does those projects himself before anyone else has a chance to volunteer. I particularly want to draw attention to the clean-up he did on pm.org (a site full of links to dead Perl Monger groups isn’t great advertising) and his work trying to increase Perl’s visibility at non-Perl conferences.
• Matt Trout and Mark Keating set up the Iron Man Blogging competition. To my mind this has been the single biggest success in marketing Perl this year. I’m still astonished daily by the number of people out there who are blogging about Perl. They have somewhere around two hundred blogs in the competition.
• Leo Lapworth has done some amazing work dragging Perl’s web sites into the 21st century. Not many weeks go by without Leo announcing that he has redesigned another web site. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some of his announcements, but for a sample of his work see www.perl.org, learn.perl.org, dbi.perl.org and lists.perl.org. Thanks should also go to his employers, Foxtons, who donated some of his time (and some time from a web designer too).

Of course it’s true that the recent resurgence of Perl is due to the new and improved modules that you can find on CPAN. Moose, DBIx::Class, Catalyst and Plack (to name only four) are what enables Perl to retain its place in the forefront of modern programming languages. But it’s the people listed above (and dozens of other who also work on marketing projects) who enable Perl news to break out of the echo chamber.

We owe these people our thanks. And, on a more practical level, we owe them beer. If you see them at a Perl Mongers meeting, at a conference or even just on the street, it is your duty to stop them and say the magic words:

“Hi. Thanks for your work. Can I buy you a beer?”