Would you like to talk to Perl programmers or about Perl?

There were about 30 Perl events last year. On some Perl Workshops there are 30-50 people on the German Perl Workshop there are 130. On YAPC::EU there are about 300 visitors.

On FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium there were about 5,000 people and my guess is that about 300-400 visited the Perl booth. Many of them were writing Perl and almost none of them have ever been to a Perl Workshop or YAPC.

On CeBIT in Hannover, Germany there were about 1,000 visitors at the Perl booth. While the experience level seemed a lot more varied here still many knew and used Perl but again almost none of them have ever been to a Perl Workshop or YAPC and almost none of them are members of any Perl Monger mailing lists.

On LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany there are going to be about 10,000 visitors. I expect to have 600-800 visitors at the Perl booth.

On the other hand many of the visitors only heard about Perl but never used it or never even seen it really. Many of those had negative views. Before they came to our booth.

So while I think the Perl workshops and YAPCs are great you can see from these numbers why going to non-Perl events has a lot of potential in finding Perl developers (if you are an employer) or telling Perl developers about various new development in perl and on CPAN. (Moose anyone?) Finally it is a great opportunity to show Perl to people who have never used it and seen it and make them curious about it.

As I mentioned in my blog post Perl booth at LinuxTag Berlin between 9-12 June, 2010 we are looking for people to help at the booth in Berlin. Of course if you are not around that area there are lots of other events where you can attend, give a talk about some Perl based thing and even setup a booth to attract many more people. The events group already has a long list of events and I created a Google calendar of the events where we could talk about Perl.