Meetup.com is planning a Battle of the Braces tournament-style hackathon at their headquarters in NYC. At the time of posting, Perl is not invited.
Admittedly, the profile of Perl on Meetup.com isn’t huge compared to the four languages they did invite. Here is a comparison of the size of NYC meetup groups per language (with heavy overlap, I’m sure):
- Ruby: NYC on Rails (1800+), NYC.rb (1500+), New York Ruby Meetup (1000+), Ruby Nuby (1000+) [Wow, Rubyists – you have a lot of meetups!]
- Python: New York Python Meetup (1800+)
- Javascript: How to Javascript (1100+), New York Javascript Meetup (1000+)
- PHP: New York PHP Meetup (800+)
In contrast, the New York Perl Mongers meetup group is up to 250 members now that we’ve started holding talks again.)
Am I surprised that Perl is left out? Not really. A lot of the hackathon activity I’ve seen seems to be about: publicity for someone’s API, VC’s looking for the next killer app, or a recruiting opportunity for the many companies desperate for developers. For recruiting and API publicity, hackathon sponsors would naturally gravitate to the trendiest dynamic languages.
Should NY.pm advocate for a spot in the contest? I have mixed feelings about it. Personally, I’ve got too much on my plate and too few tuits to chase after hackathons for glory. I wonder if many of the NY Perl Mongers are likewise busy getting things done and I have no idea who has hackathon experience. After all, if you’re going to field some teams to represent a language, it’s a good idea to work to get some good teams to participate. [Sadly, Plat_Forms was canceled this year.]
I’ll bring this up at some of our meetups in April and see what people think.