Rename Perl 5? Marketing: UR DOIN IT WRONG

Earlier this month Ovid once again raised the question: Should we rename Perl?”

As usual, the question sparked a flurry of opinions on the matter. Most of the discussion occurred in the comments of Ovid’s original post.

I’m not here to chime in on that question. Whether the name should change or should not, what it should change to, when it would happen, these questions are all closed. RJBS has said there will be no change right now and that’s that. He is driving the Perl 5 bus right now. If he says the name is not changing then that’s good enough for me. Discussion closed.

No, I’m not here to discuss that matter. I’m here to point something out:

Damn, team. That was some dismal marketing I just witnessed.

Just what exactly is the problem you’re looking to solve here? Where are the metrics to support that? Whom are you looking to convince? How will the solution be rolled out? Who’s going to do the work? What’s it going to cost? How will you know when the work is done? How will you know whether it’s working?

None of the people participating in the conversation would ever consider releasing a small patch to a CPAN module without first having a complete set of tests for it. Yet the same people seem to have no problem changing something as fundamental as the name of the language without performing some sort of market research and testing.

Despite the reputation its earned, marketing is not a crap shoot. A successful marketing or branding campaign requires just as much forethought and carefully considered execution as a good piece of software. You don’t just throw it together, put it out there and hope it does what the target audience needs. It could be impossible to recover from the damage caused by rash branding decisions.

I would welcome nothing more than more discussions about whether Perl 5 should be renamed. But I would like them to be as well researched and considered as any other change which would be made to the language itself.