The Perl 5 - Perl 6 divide

Executive summary:

Modern Perl 5 leads over Future Perl 6 at a ratio of 16:12.

Details

With only a week before Nordic Perl Workshop I looked at the two pages of the schedule.

Act - the conference organizer tool got a neat feature lately.

Registered and logged in people can mark the talks they plan to attend by clicking a little star in front of each talk - they can even mark several talks in the same time-slot if they are undecided. Later they can use the Personal Schedule link to see and print the schedule they created for themselves.

This feature has now an additional value. Everyone, including people who have not logged in to the system can see the total number of stars on each talk.

If we look at those pages we can see that in every row the total is less than 33. So we can assume that about one third of participants have used the feature so far. According to the Statistics page, there are about 100 people who have already committed themselves to the workshop by paying their tickets.

The number of stars on the Go Open track is really small because that's basically a separate conference and the participants of that conference don't use this system. So you can only see a few of the NPW attendees who visit the neighbors, the bulk marked talks in either of the two Perl tracks. The two tracks are basically divided along Perl 5 - the Modern track and Perl 6 - the Future track.

We can see that in some cases the interest level is about the same The Perl 6 Express got 15 while the 4 talks in the same time-slot got either 14 or 16.

In other cases, especially on the second day the ration is 15:10 and even 22:10 in favor of the Modern Perl track.

The only case when it is different is the last talk on the second day, but only because the Padre talk I am giving is actually for both Perl 5 and Perl 6 users.

So I took the stars and calculated the averages of each track leaving the Padre talk and the Request Tracker talk out of the calculation. This is what brought the 16:12 ratio in favor of the Perl 5 track.

I hope more people will mark their preferences so we get a better picture by the time of the workshop.