Tom, thanks for voicing many of the same concerns I've had recently, especially as I watched this debate evolve. I too have been making a living for several years working in Perl, and would much prefer to continue doing so into the future. I've worked in many languages in over 30 years of programming, but perl is far and away the most enjoyable and capable one to work in. Its primary attraction is that it comes the closest yet to being "The Language without limits." It's rare to bump up against the artificial limits that are so common in other compilers and interpreters, and equally rare to find something that can't be done -- little or no working around language roadblocks! Making "easy things easy and hard things possible" has truly been my experience and won me over completely.
However I am reluctantly preparing to shift my primary marketing focus from perl to other areas: rates and the number of opportunities in the US for perl work have been on a steady decline for sometime now. I've noticed, too, as David Cantrell mentioned, that this does not appear to be quite the case yet in other parts of the world, but I'm not ready to make that drastic a relocation for the sake of perl work, much as I enjoy it. And based on the rise of PHP, Python, and other, newer opensource solutions I wonder if it's only a question of time elsewhere as well. My suggestion to the perl community would be that perl should be re-positioned as the language for dealing with hard problems. Perl clearly has lost the battle for ease-of-entry to PHP, and probably Python, but where it still has the advantage is in the ability to make it possible to code a solution where other languages hit the wall. There's a high-ground position that's still open above coding-for-the-masses that would still provide many worthwhile opportunities in my opinion, and that's where I'd like to see Perl go. Jim Eshelman www.nepm.net Network Monitoring with a difference ... Replying to Tom Metro: > For me, popularity matters for two reasons: > > 1. If you like Perl enough that you'd like it to be all or a big part of > your day job. > > Which leads me to something I've been wondering about lately: How many > Boston.pm members can say that their primary income comes from being a > Perl programmer? That Perl is front-and-center on their resume. And if > you're an independent consultant, that you market yourself as a perl > developer/expert. _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
