The Perl Foundation (TPF) is passionate about helping our software communities flourish.

Jump in a time machine and let's see some suggestions for how we can improve Perl, Raku and TPF's branding.

Remember the saying from Perl-people? "We suck at marketing". Well, not all of us. Some of us are rather good at marketing. Some well-known Perl heroes are good at what they do and good at promoting that, and promoting Perl at the same time. I do my bit and it seems to be appreciated every now and then. I will tell you what I do for marketing Perl, what I think the effect of that is, and how easy it is for you to join me to show other people how awesome Perl is. I will mention some of my Perl heroes, YAPC's, Fosdem, workshops, PM meetings, tuits, buttons, stickers, and more.

Modern computer science is dominated by men. But it hasn't always been this way.

A lot of computing pioneers — the people who programmed the first digital computers — were women. And for decades, the number of women studying computer science was growing faster than the number of men. But in 1984, something changed. The percentage of women in computer science flattened, and then plunged, even as the share of women in other technical and professional fields kept rising.

What happened?

We spent the past few weeks trying to answer this question, and there's no clear, single answer.

But here's a good starting place: The share of women in computer science started falling at roughly the same moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers.

These early personal computers weren't much more than toys. You could play pong or simple shooting games, maybe do some word processing. And these toys were marketed almost entirely to men and boys.