I upset a lot of people with my Perl 5 is Dying post. In fact, that is far and away one of the most heavily cited posts I have. I made people mad at me. I made a lot of people talk. While I'm sorry I made people mad (and I've had some blunt comments directed at me in pubs as a result), I'm very proud of that post. It got a lot of people arguing and thinking and I like to believe it spurred a few people (well, me at least) to do something about it. Here are just a few things which have been happening to turn things around (I am not taking credit for this. Many of these things would have happened any way and I was simply one of many people pointing out the problem).

First, and this is totally subjective, I don't see as many "Perl is dead" posts being written and Perl buzz is improving somewhat, as measured by TIOBE. Plus, Perl and is still doing excellently in job trends:

The Perl Foundation Marketing Committee is doing well and Dan Magnuszewski has been doing good work keeping on top of things and you can subscribe to the marketing list to see for yourself. Gabor Szabo has been particularly active here and has done tireless work in this area. Uri Guttman has also been helping out and helped connect us with Rich Sands, an excellent software marketing and business strategy executive who's working with TPF to help fix Perl's marketing issues. His previous experience with Sun and Java is clearly shining through here.

Meanwhile, Leo Lapworth has been busy revamping a lot of Perl web sites (and has more up his sleeve) and Jon Allen has been doing the same, including with the perl.org's most popular subdomain, perldoc.perl.org.

chromatic's Modern Perl Books blog is rather popular and helping to spread the word about best practices in Perl. Oh, and I would be silly to ignore the fact that blogs.perl.org is a shiny new blogging platform which the folks at Six Apart have done such an excellent job helping with (and many thanks to Dave and Aaron for their work on it!). There are several people here participating in the Perl Iron Man competition that Matt Trout announced as part of the Enlightened Perl project.

In short, we've come a long way. A number of these initiatives started before the "Perl is dying" post and a number of them happened after. I don't want to confuse correlation with causation because many of them would have happened anyway, so please don't think I'm taking credit for this. This post is to simply give people a "heads up" as to where we are and where we're going.

Of course, there's quite a bit more I could mention, but this post is getting long enough as is. My apologies to all the folks working in this area who I've not mentioned. I think things are definitely looking up and I'm very happy to see so many excellent people pitching in.

Thank you all.