Ruth Holloway

Connie, you're welcome to that perception, but the Perl community I hang out with has been continuing to grow steadily, with a number of major players contributing very large sums toward the Perl 5 Core Maintenance work of The Perl Foundation. The conference I talked about has grown year-over-year, with more sponsors each year (all of whom are hiring, it seems) and YAPC::Asia is a truly huge conference, up in the thousands of attendees, from what I hear.

It seems to be a common belief, despite that, that Perl 5 is outdated and less-than-useful, but there's an awful lot of code still being written in it. My focus in the article was less aimed at the language, and more at the amazing *people* in the Perl community.

Perl is a really handy multi-purpose scripting language; Koha is written in Perl, as are a lot of other great web-based applications.

The best way, in my opinion, to get involved, is to find the thing or things you're passionate about, and start with that. If it's an end-user problem (like, in my case, library automation), then you end up in a project like Koha, that's end-user-facing. But if your passion is databases, or big data, or faster web pages, or something internal, there are coding communities working on those problems, too. For instance, if you're a fan of the fancy new "FooBase" database engine, writing a Perl library to talk to it would be a really useful thing to do! Start with your passions!