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OT: C Perl and every employer wants .net and asp

by Angel (Friar)
on Dec 12, 2002 at 16:33 UTC ( [id://219362]=perlquestion: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

Angel has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear Monks, I have a bunch of general questions that I need answered and instead of filling up the entire Skeers of Perl Wisdom with my questions I am posing them as a list since I figure a few of you will be able to answer them.

1. Is there a "C Monks"? Or something like this. I really need to learn C/C++ because it seems many employers in the NYC area wants that or C# and dot net.

2. ( And I know this will get me flamed ) Can "web services" be written in perl? Should I continue learning perl? I goto all of these job websites and I finally got decent at the Perl language but all of the web development jobs want asp and .net.

I graduated in May and havebeen trying to get work but all I can manage to get my hands on it a few one to two week contracts. And it seems at places likemonster.com, lijobs.com, and the times and newsday if you want to be a web developer Perl is not the way to go. I am buying a book on asp since I obviously need the skills but it makes me wonder if the time for Perl has passed.

This is not a flame just a very serious concern from a recent graduate who learned Perl do do his senior website project.

Any Ideas?

Title edit by tye to add "OT:"

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: C Perl and every employer wants .net and asp
by davorg (Chancellor) on Dec 12, 2002 at 16:53 UTC
    Can "web services" be written in perl? Should I continue learning perl? I goto all of these job websites and I finally got decent at the Perl language but all of the web development jobs want asp and .net.

    "Web services" is just a buzzword for systems exchanging XML over HTTP (or some other network protocol). Perl is great for processing XML or for network programming so, yes, it's great for web services.

    Check out SOAP::Lite or O'Reilly's forthcoming book Programming Web Services with Perl.

    --
    <http://www.dave.org.uk>

    "The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
    -- Chip Salzenberg

(jeffa) Re: C Perl and every employer wants .net and asp
by jeffa (Bishop) on Dec 12, 2002 at 16:58 UTC
    What do you want to do? If you want to continue to use Perl, then please do so. If you want to use PHP, go right ahead - .NET, no problem - Java, sure ...

    My point is that you as a recent graduate need experience. Regardless of what language you picked to do your website project, you should have learned about the process of website creation. That knowledge should transcend how a particular language (implementation) works in that environment. Learn the base skills and use that as an opportunity to get a job programming a particular language.

    Even if you do get a job that doesn't use Perl (my job requires PHP right now), you can still use the skills you learned from Perl to help you solve problems. Perl is more than just a programming language, it is a programming style. My Java and especially my PHP have improved tenfold thanks to Perl. Even if i never professionally program Perl again (don't worry - i will!), i will never regret spending the time that i have learning Perl.

    Last thought, if you really want to learn .NET and all that, i recommend you find a Microsoft shop that will hire you and pay for your training and certifications. That was the first job i had out of college and it saved me probably $1000 on certification and training fees. Best of luck to you!

    jeffa

    L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
    -R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
    B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
    H---H---H---H---H---H---
    (the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)
    
Re: C Perl and every employer wants .net and asp
by emilford (Friar) on Dec 12, 2002 at 16:49 UTC
    I also ran into this problem. I started learning perl so that I could use it for various parts of my personal website. After I graduated this past May, I took a job as a web developer with a fairly large-scale company here in DC. Of course, perl was out of the question from the beginning and all coding was done in VBScript/ASP. It was difficult coding the ASP pages. Not because the language was difficult to learn, but because I could always think of a simpler, more straightforward approach in perl. Perl is just that type of language...it tends to work the same way you think.

    1) I learned C/C++ while still in school. I haven't been able to find anything even remotely comparable to pm.org. The perl community is fortunate to have such a great website available to them. I've learned so much from this place. I'd invest in some good books if you're interested in learning C/C++.

    2) I'd still continue to learn perl. There are many good reasons, but the most important: it's the coolest damn language in the world. Seriously though, perl has many useful applications. At my previous job, although I wasn't able to use perl for our websites, I still used perl to simplify a lot of tasks that were taking others 3-4 times as long. Stick with perl...you'll find uses for it.

    I'd also search for other related nodes. I know I posted a discussion on this a while back as I was concerned just as you are. My new job is strictly C/C++ application development, but I still find room for a little perl.

    HTH,
    Eric
Re: C Perl and every employer wants .net and asp
by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Dec 12, 2002 at 17:41 UTC
    Web services could be written in Perl, but I don't know of any application servers like Tomcat, Silverstream, or Websphere that are geared for Perl. Don't count on Perl being a major asset if you want to go into the website business. But just because nowdays Java, C#, .net or whatever is more popular for webservices you are wrong to conclude that the time for Perl has passed. It hasn't. Perl predates the internet hype. Perl is popular among system admins, and will remain so. But you won't get a job as a sysadmin just because you know Perl. You become a sysadmin because you know your stuff - the fact you use Perl to do your work is of minor importance.

    I've had quite a lot of jobs the last 6 years. In all the jobs I used Perl. Only one job, which I had for about 10 weeks, was as a "Perl programmer". The rest were just jobs where I was using Perl to do my work - I could have done it with Python or C as well, would that have been my preference.

    Abigail

      Although not geared for Perl, Oracle 9iAS does ship with mod_perl (since the server is based around Apache I don't suppose that it was much of a stretch for them). Not only that, but Perl is specifically mentioned in the documentation (even in a few diagrams), and Perl scripts are used to perform the post install configuration.

      On a side note, I was recently on-site at a Java/Oracle shop helping them out with Oracle JMS Web Services (ie a SOAP server): whilst waiting for the 250MB of Oracle patches (yes, that's right 250MB!) to download/unzip/install, I installed Perl 5.6.1, SOAP::Lite and HTTP::Daemon and wrote a couple of dozen lines of Perl that did the same job as they'd been working on in Java for weeks.

      rdfield

Re: C Perl and every employer wants .net and asp
by joe++ (Friar) on Dec 12, 2002 at 16:56 UTC
      CPAN isn't unique. There's also CTAN, for TeX. CTAN not only predates CPAN, but the CPAN idea was "stolen" from CTAN.

      Over the years though, CPAN has developed a much better interface than CTAN.

      Abigail

Re: C Perl and every employer wants .net and asp
by jsegal (Friar) on Dec 12, 2002 at 23:05 UTC
    I will second the various comments that you should focus on concepts rather than languages per se. That being said, if you want a resource for c and c++, check out the newsgroups comp.lang.c and comp.lang.c++ (especially the FAQ for comp.lang.c++, which is a pretty impressive guide in and of itself, and is available at http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/. The comp.lang.c FAQ is at http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html).

    (Newsgroups are a virtual-community technology which predates the web, but are still around and going strong. In fact, the author of one of the most widespread early newsreaders ("rn") was none other than Larry Wall himself. But I digress...).

    Nowadays, you can quite easily read news over the web via http://groups.google.com, and Netscape still has a newsreader built in...

    Also, if you plan on becoming a perl guru or a Microsoft ASP guru (or both), in either case you should also know C well -- the best/most flexible way of accessing the internals of either platform is through C. Case in point -- perl itself (at least up through perl 5) is written in C.

    Best of luck...

    --JAS
Re: C Perl and every employer wants .net and asp
by xtype (Deacon) on Dec 12, 2002 at 17:37 UTC
    ++ to the other good responses.

    ...and if you do choose to continue with Perl, and really, really want to get paid for your Perl knowledge, you can check out jobs.perl.org and browse the current perl job listings.
    Seems Amazon is hiring a lot of Perl programmers lately (or trying to rather).
    -xtype
Re: C Perl and every employer wants .net and asp
by Acolyte (Hermit) on Dec 12, 2002 at 18:06 UTC

    I'm just a few years down the road from you and work in the type of environment you are describing. Even though my focus has been ASP and .NET, I have been fortunate enough to maintain one critical Perl script over the last three years. The script was recently retired, and I came to the monks to get ideas for other things I can do with Perl, even though I'm in an MS shop. They provided some great advice in Last Script. What now? that you might find useful

    Cheers!

    Acolyte
    Studying at the feet of the masters
Re: C Perl and every employer wants .net and asp
by krujos (Curate) on Dec 12, 2002 at 23:45 UTC
    ++ Everyone pointing out that programming is more than the languages you know. This is one of the most important lessons a programmer / student can learn.
    That said, cplusplus.com is a good reasource for c++.
Re: C Perl and every employer wants .net and asp
by arrow (Friar) on Dec 12, 2002 at 20:56 UTC
    I don't have the same dilemma but I think I will soon. I'm 15 and learning Perl, and I love Perl, but from what angel and others have said, should I be focused on learning other languages as well? Right now I only know Perl, but I've played with C++ a little. Should C++ and C# be my goals? And which other languages should I learn?

    Just Another Perl Wannabe

      You should focus on learning programming skills, not just programming languages.

      I started learning COBOL (now I'm really showing my age) then learned and used various forms of BASIC, started with C (wasn't really my thing), had a dab at Java (definitely not my thing) and finally "settled" on PERL (and I'm forgetting that I also use SQL, XML, XSLT, ...)

      The thing is: in all languages there are the same basic skills which come back over and over again and you will find that you will "learn" a language faster and faster the more experience you have.

      CountZero

      "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

        This is an exelent point CountZero, one that helped me a lot in college.
        eh...
        if it makes you feel any better some schools (see data and file processing)

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