Posted by christefano on September 27, 2010 at 10:46pm
In the most active list at YC News there's an interesting discussion about unfilled Perl jobs in Los Angeles. Does anyone have any thoughts about whether this phenomenon has to do with the tech scene in Los Angeles or if it has more to do with the state of Perl?
Comments
Discussion on Perl
There's not much love in that spread. May be one reason people aren't running to Perl (if that's true).
Don
Have worked with perl while
Have worked with perl while parking in academic institution a while back, I would not even consider a perl job when I was looking. Thinking my skill in that area is rusty, so I would always downplay it, considering that I prefer not to get stuck on perl right now.
I still do perl work
Christefano, I did not realize you followed perl! Is that thread worth reading? I've been on the LAPM list from day one. Even before that, in another perl user group I helped start several years earlier.
I started perl 3.0 in 1993 for full time CGI work. Perl has come a long way since then. A ton of library routines one must know, along with OO, though not all jobs need both, most do now a days. Knowing these routines means doing a job in 1/2 or even 1/10 the time of a perl coder without that knowledge. I think that is one reason many perl coders do not hang out their hat. Expectations that they must have prior knowledge or power techniques. OO can to perl sideways, that is C++ had it first, so did Java. Those skilled in C or Java have not migrated towards perl. That's not to say perl is not superpowerful, it is. Perl's OO mode is even faster than Java's. I've heard of many Java enterprises being ported to Perl, for speed reasons. Or php. Now, I am hearing about php/perl code being ported to Java, just this year.
So, I'll go back, find time to read that thread, some of the long posts, like the first one, all the way.
Who knows, I might port Drupal to perl.
Peter
LA's Open Source User Group Advocate - Volunteer at DrupalCamp LA and SCALE
Perl will never die, but it isn't a grwoth language
Perl will always be the only language for the folks who love Perl, otherwise, it is waning. It is still a goto for many system administrators, because it works and there are a ton of documented methods and scripts. I think that those are the only folks learning it today.
"Go" is the new goto language. At least at Google, where it was written :)
I like Python myself, but my system administrator likes Perl, so that's what we use.
Number of factors
Company I used to be with was mainly a perl shop (west LA) and were ALWAYS looking for and had problems finding Perl developers. For a number of factors, I observed. Perl is not as "fresh" as newcomer languages (ror, php, etc), so younger developers aren't doing perl. Older developers don't want to work on the west side, and if a company doesn't allow telecommuting, that's a deal breaker. Commute, cost of living, etc, were factors in people not wanting to take their offer.