I no longer work for O'Reilly Media in any capacity. My only relationship with the company is passive: receiving royalties for books I've already written.
To my knowledge, no one currently employed by O'Reilly, whether directly or via contract, has the responsibility to publish on Perl.com in any fashion. I expect that this state of affairs will continue indefinitely, but any comment on the company's current and future plans for any of its ventures is mere speculation on my part.
Please discontinue the use of my oreilly.com email address and direct all questions about Perl.com to webmaster@oreilly.com or webmaster@perl.com.
... that nobody will take care of perl.com any more. For a moment, it looked like there was a revival going on, with several new articles appearing in the last two months; the update frequency had been a lot lower (one post every few months) until recently.
I take it as a sign of the demise of Perl. Not that the enthusiasm of Perl users has diminished, but that the industry (in particular, O'Reilly, (AFAIK) the publishers of the very first Perl book ever) no longer believes in Perl.
Re:It's a shame, really...
Arador on 2009-02-04T10:10:07
Yeah. Can't say it surprised me, but it does hurt.Re:It's a shame, really...
brian_d_foy on 2009-02-07T00:33:01
It's not necessarily that O'Reilly no longer believes in Perl, but it's hard to justify maintaing a website if it doesn't generate money to pay the people maintaining it. That can be the case for all sorts of reasons other than the state of Perl. It's not a sign of anything.
I haven't had a tough time getting Perl books published by O'Reilly, and I've been doing that at about one a year. There's arm twisting whatsoever. Indeed, I'm often pressed for the next one.
Re:It's a shame, really...
chromatic on 2009-02-07T08:02:41
I haven't had a tough time getting Perl books published by O'Reilly....
Heh. I was pressed to submit an outline recently, by an editor, a publisher, and somewhat indirectly by the owner of the company. It's funny how quickly that changed. When I said "O'Reilly is no longer interested in publishing this Perl book", I meant it.
Re:It's a shame, really...
brian_d_foy on 2009-02-07T16:12:19
Well, publishing a particular book is different than hating the entire general topic.
Re:It's a shame, really...
TheNomad on 2009-02-07T15:54:30
I doubt it is much to do with Perl and more to do with the credit crunch.
People, I know, working in IT have felt the full force of the downturn as the first thing businesses cut is any development/consultancy work. Many businesses reason thusly: "it would be nice to have a better system, but the one we've got works fine for the moment, thanks very much."
Less IT means less need for books about IT.
Add to that the fact that it is cheaper and quicker to read the POD/man page/use Google than buy a book about programming and it doesn't take much to see that publishers will have trouble.
In which case you have my sympathies. A lot of people I know are going through that right now.
Hopefully you have a job, but if not, be assured that there are jobs out there, particularly for exceptional people like yourself. But they can be hard to find.
But I will say from the offers I have received recently that finding a job is considerably easier if you are willing to relocate. The few companies that are hiring generally want you to move to them rather than vice versa. For example perhaps you want to live in Amsterdam?
Re:I assume this is tied to last month's layoff
Aristotle on 2009-02-07T00:34:26
Clearly they are the new Databorg…
Re:Perl.com is being maintained
chromatic on 2009-02-09T17:25:19
Who's publishing that news, Marsee? If an unpaid blogger happens to write something Perl-related, it may or may not show up on Perl.com. If O'Reilly decides to publish another Perl book, I'm sure something you or Sara writes will show up on Perl.com. Beyond that, who's updating the site?
