In this day and age Kotlin is probably your best bet but if you take on
Java you are 90% there with regards to Kotlin. As for Perl, unless you are
in a very specific niche Perl is pretty much dead as a commercially viable
option as there are too few people that are halfway decent at it so no
company would be silly enough to build a large project based on Perl these
days. It lacks a lot of the modern conveniences that Java for instance
offers. The chances of finding an up to date library for interaction with
any modern software package are virtually zero and a lot of people that are
not very good at perl have written a lot of very ugly code that is near
unreadable and certainly not maintainable giving the language a very poor
reputation in the overall software development community.
Now that is not to say Perl cannot still be a great language to learn and
have fun with. There are still, albeit niche, areas where you will find
perl used certainly in the EDI (Electronic Data Interchange space for
instance) Perl is still a commonly sought after skill. And as time
progresses people with these skills will get more and more rare allowing
those that possess this arcane knowledge to charge an arm and a leg for
their services much like Cobal developers and Mainframe specialists do now.
Keep in mind that Perl is written by a linguist and as such (especially for
English speakers) has a very natural syntax making it easy to learn. At the
same time and this is where the ugly code syndrom comes in, it is
extremely flexible with regards to syntax making it very easy to construct
pretty ugly code. Because just like in natural language there are many ways
to say the same thing and though they all are syntactically correct most
are ugly or worse quite confusing.
As with any language Perl can be great and quite nicely written but even in
its heyday those who wrote beautiful Perl code where rare, these days the
majority of people writing Perl for commercial purposes come from other
languages and are forced to write Perl out of necessity rather than desire.
So the quality of their code is often less than they would find acceptable
in their language of choice. So if you do go down the Perl route expect to
have to deal with ugly code an awful lot and unfortunately quite a few
"real" developers that look down on someone that still practices the dark
arts as they believe Perl to be slow, near impossible to maintain and not a
real programming language.
So my advice is start with Java if you are planning on working in the IT
world (way more job opportunities even for very inexperienced people). Do
Perl on the side and when you have proven yourself as a developer and like
to write in Perl you can always look for a job where you get to practice
the dark arts. Doing it the other way around you will find far less
opportunities, and often a demand for quite senior people as the existing
code is ancient there is no one else that can read it and it is used in a
quite critical operation.
On Sun, Oct 29, 2023 at 2:14 AM Claude Brown via beginners <
beginners@perl.org> wrote:
> I’d go with Java, in order:
>
>
>
>- Popularity – there is just more stuff being written in Java. This
>would indicate the employment options are greater.
> - https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
> - Java currently rates 4th vs Perl at 27th
>
>
>
>- Over the long arc, Java probably has a faster learning curve. As
>much as I love Perl, it has some rather arcane syntax at times.
>
>
>
> I’m sure you will get many opinions to the contrary on a Perl mailing list
>
>
>
>
> FWIW, I’d wildly guess the following for my coding time:
>
>- 90% using Perl
>- 9% using PHP/JavaScript for web-pages
>- 0.9% in, say, C++ or C
>- 0.09% in Java or C#
>
>
>
> The rest of the time I slack off.
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> Claude.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* William Torrez Corea
> *Sent:* Sunday, October 29, 2023 8:46 AM
> *To:* Perl Beginners
> *Subject:* Preference
>
>
>
> *CAUTION:* This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not
> click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know
> the content is safe.
>
> What is preferable to learn?
>
>
>
> Java or Perl
>
>
>
> What is the learning curve of this language of programming?
>
>
> --
>
>
> With kindest regards, William.
>
> ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
> ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Debian - The universal operating system
> ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ https://www.debian.org
> ⠈⠳⣄
>
>
