Two days into CeBIT

I really have no energy to write much. The first day of CeBIT was a bit low on visitors but even that went quite well. I met with several people I wanted to talk. Especially interesting were the chats with the people from the Eclipse Foundation.

Today, on the second day, was a lot busier. Many people were walking around and many people came to the Perl stand as well. There are always 3-4 [dist://Perl::Staff] people at the stand and usually they are busy talking to visitors.

Some PHP and Ruby developers came and we could show them interesting things that can be done with Perl, Moose, Catalyst and [dist://DBIx::Class]. Many people also liked Padre, you know the Perl IDE

There were many people who said that the main problem they are facing is the lack of Perl developers and some of them told us that they are actually considering switching language because of this. It seems to them that it is easy to find programmers to many other languages, something that was the case with Perl as well a few year ago but now there don't seem to be any Perl programmers. I wonder what could be the reason of that? Where are does developers gone? Have they stopped using Perl and have they remove Perl from their CV? Are there many more jobs now filled by those developers without new developers learning Perl to fill the newly created jobs? Maybe the expectations from a Perl developer are now higher than 5-10 years ago so the same people who could counted as Perl developers 5 years ago aren't considered as such any more?

Anyway we have a lot more work to do in the coming days. I'll try to add some pictures to the next report.

Renee made some nice pictures of Perl on CeBIT