The future of Perl? (Perl 6, employability)

Question

I\'ve found a few related questions, like Python vs. Perl (now deleted) and Is Perl Worth it? (now deleted), but I can\'t seem to find anything that directly a

Answer 1

Anyone who actually watches the development of Perl, would know that that there has perhaps been more work on the Perl language in the past decade, than in the previous decade.

This has been spurred on by the introduction of Perl6.

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The introduction of Perl 6 spurred on, the now deeply ingrained, testing culture.

Just look at how much the Rakudo implementation of Perl 6, is tested:

Rakudo Progress http://rakudo.de/progress.png

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There has also been a lot of back-porting of Perl 6 features into Perl 5.

For example, the Perl 6 "switch" statement

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.10.1;
# or 
use feature qw'switch say';

my $str = "testing 123";

given( $str ){
  when(/(\d+)/){
    say $1;
  }
  when( [0..10] ){
    say $_, 'is equal to some number between 0 and 10';
    # given, sets the current topic "$_"
  }
}

Answer 2

There are few languages I would tie my career to. Perl will always be there and it will always be the best tool for certain kinds of jobs. But this is true for many languages. However, there are also languages which have more competition in some of the spaces where they are used. Perl is one language that has a lot more strong niches.

Still, you wouldn't restrict yourself to using just one language for your entire life - or even in one project if there are better options to solve a problem.

Career-wise, there are basic technologies which are fairly universally used, and of these I think a few of the most valuable are: relational database concepts and SQL, XML/HTML/HTTP/DOM, regular expressions. These are all basically independent of any particular vendor or language, and if you are strong in these areas, choice of language and platform are going to be informed by the problem being addressed.

Answer 3

Perl is another tool in your toolbox. If I have an opening and one person is narrow focused to a specific technology, and another has a broad range of skills I would be more inclined to hire the one with the wider range of skills even if they might not be quite as deeply knowledgeable. Some one who has a wide range of skills on a range of platforms is someone who can think, innovate and adapt.

Answer 4

I don't understand the point of this question. You have a job and you already know Perl. You can ask whether or not to learn new languages and which ones to learn (please don't, but you could), but none of us can or should predict whether or not you're going to get another job using Perl.

You ask, "Is having this job on my resume ultimately going to make me less employable, especially if the language no longer grows?"

Well, it's better than a blank resume, and you can't change your past, so really what are we talking about here?

Answer 5

I'd discourage you from putting Perl on your resume - there's already too many people in the perl market and we don't want any more! ... just kidding.

The past is supposedly no guide to the future, but, despite having plenty of C (etc.) and Java in my 'skills toolbag' I've seen more gainful employ from my Perl than anything else over the last decade.

I suspect that offshore-perl-new-build may not be the biggest market in the future, but there's certainly active development in the city and media industries in the UK.

Otherwise, I'd just agree with the points above. Technicians with diverse skills are more able to pick the right tools, and less inclined to 'get religious' about language choice.

If you're looking at a post where the non-technical management have a strong point of view about what technology should and shouldn't be used - I'd place that one in the 'avoid' pile.

Answer 6

Perl is, and always will be, a practical language for manipulating large amounts of data. I work in an industry where moving, converting, and parsing large amounts of text and image data is what we do, and I couldn't live without Perl.

Likewise, if you're a sysadmin (especially a Unix one), Perl is a necessary tool. There are tons of places where you need to be able to whip up a quick and dirty application that runs right along with the shell functions.

Languages have niches. Perl has a big stable niche, in many ways much more stable than fad-driven web languages. PHP, for example, is a nice little web language, but its saving grace is that it's quick and easy to develop in, not that it is a particularly great language. I'll tend to use PHP over Perl for web applications (though I use Python over PHP, if I have time), but 90% of the stuff I do in my day-to-day would be nearly impossible in PHP, and is flat trivial in Perl.

@Nate: I love Python. LOVE it. I actually worry that I love it too much, and I'm being irrational about it. PHP is a nice tool, but when your main selling point is "Quick and Easy" then you're running a risk. That was the big push behind original Visual Basic, and we all know how that worked out.