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from the There’s-more-than-one-way-to-do-it,-but-sometimes-consistency-is-not-a-bad-thing-either dept.
Ruth Holloway at Red Hat's marketing site, OpenSource.com, has a retrospective on three decades of perl covering some history and a few of the top user groups. The powerful and flexible scripting language perl turns 30 at the end of this year. It is a practical extraction and reporting language widely used even today and has a dedicated community. It's ease of use and power made it the go-to tool through the boom of the 90's and 00's when the WWW was growing exponentially. However, its flexible syntax, while often an advantage, also functions as a sort of Rorschach test. One that some programmers fail. Perhaps two of its main strengths are pattern matching and CPAN. The many, mature perl modules available from CPAN make it a first choice for many when needed to draft something quickly or deal with a quick task.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday October 12 2017, @05:39AM (2 children)
Is it that they can't find any Perl programmers, or that they can't find any Perl programmers that will accept their pay? Those two are very different conditions.
And it is quite easy to produce Perl programmers: Employ programmers and let them learn Perl. Anyone not willing to learn Perl probably should not be employed for programming in any other language either. As one day you might want to switch languages, and that person might not like the language you'll switch to either. It's not as if Perl employed a completely different programming paradigm than other common languages, after all.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday October 12 2017, @05:47AM
That is always the issue isn't it? I knew how to program PERL once, or twice, but I don't do it any longer and I have not written a single line of PERL in probably 15ish years. I could relearn or refresh the knowledge if the pay was good enough, just as I could relearn to write COBOL again if it was just good enough pay -- this option is a lot more tempting since the pay would be better, even tho I don't know what PERL pay would be I suspect it would be less the writing COBOL for some bank or insurance company again. It's just that it's going to be fairly short term again I suspect and not worth the effort.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday October 13 2017, @03:43PM
Pay is actually pretty good. Let me try to explain why I think this happened; it's just a personal opinion, mind you.
I think Perl became a victim of it's own success. See, the project I work on was not touched since 2008. It is mission critical and blah blah but... In 2008 many people were laid off and the best left themselves. Normally the project would die, but Perl's one would not. It simply worked with minimal efforts. No or easily fixed critical security holes, no major outages - no nothing. Meantime java was a mess and everything java was rewritten at least twice since then. They had no choice. They had to hire java people, they had to train them, they had to promote them and generally invest, while Perl folks did not need much attention and stimulus so even more left. Of course, youngsters don't want to touch it either and the strategic decision was made to switch to java/python. But the situation is so bad that they can't even find people to reverse engineer the code. And why would a Perl expert work on killing the language? Sure, there are some folks available and they manage to hire them but even they are always looking to leave because the policy is to get away from their main trade.
As for me, I've decided it will be my last job so I stay until it's over one way or another whatever time it'd take.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.