For a lot of programmers out there, Perl has become largely invisible. They just never come across it. That might seem strange to you as you sit inside the Perl community echo chamber reading the Perl Ironman or p5p, but try this simple experiment.

Think of a web site that you use and that supplies an API. Now go to that API’s documentation and look at the example code. What languages are the examples written in? PHP? Almost certainly. Ruby? Probably. Python? Probably. C#? Quite possibly. Perl? Almost certainly not[1].

Perl has fallen so far off the radar of most people that when web sites write example code for these APIs, they very rarely consider Perl as a language worth including. And because they don’t bother including Perl then any random programmer coming to that API will assume that the API doesn’t support Perl, or (at the very least) that the lack of examples will make using Perl harder than it would be with plenty of examples to copy from.

This then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as Github fills with more and more projects using other languages to talk to these APIs. And the chance of anyone who isn’t already a Perl user ever trying to interact with these APIs using Perl falls and falls.

Of course, this is all completely wrong. These APIs are just going to be a series of HTTP requests using REST or XML-RPC (or, if you’re really unlucky, SOAP). Perl has good support for all of that. You might need to use something like OAuth to get access to the API – well Perl does that too.

Of course, in some cases good Perl support exists already – Net::Twitter is a good example. And to be fair to Twitter, their API documentation doesn’t seem to give any examples in specific languages – so Perl isn’t excluded here. But in many other cases, the Perl version languishes unnoticed on CPAN while other languages get mentioned on the API page.

I think that we can try to address this in 2014. And I’d like to ask you to help me. I’ve set up a mailing list called perl-api-squad where we can discuss this. In a nutshell, I think that the plan should be something like this:

Identify useful APIs where there is either no Perl API or no Perl examples Write CPAN API wrappers where they are missing Approve API owners and offer them Perl examples to add to their web site

That doesn’t sound too complicated to me. And I think (or, perhaps, hope) that most API owners will be grateful to add more examples of API usage to their site – particularly if it involves next to no effort on their part.

I also expect that the Perl API Squad will produce a web site that lists Perl API support. We might even move towards producing a framework that makes it easy to write a basic Perl wrapper around any new API.

What do you think? Is this a worthwhile project? Who’s interested in joining in?

[1] Yes, I know there are exceptions. But they are just that – exceptions.