As the great and powerful LanX said, it’s been discussed. What one language you should focus on is decided by far more than usage stats and Ruby/Python/Perl/Scala and others are quite similar on many level so learning one is a good jump on the others.

It matters where you live. Junior devs will generally never get (good) telecommute positions because they are competing with senior devs around the world.

It matters what your focus and comfort zone is. JavaScript is full stack now and on every device and with the slowburn of HTML5 and ES6 being adopted, it is an excellent place to invest in the near future. Other focuses like DB admin, sysadmin, testing… these jobs are readily available. Perl is a superior side-talent for most of them.

It matters what your cognitive bent is. Quite a few Perl hackers prefer Perl, warts and all, to all other languages because, as TheDamian once remarked, it allows you to hack how you think; no matter how you think.

It matters what your career goals are. Perl jobs are guaranteed if you have the skill or are in the right place—because there is a ton of Perl in the wild but fewer and fewer good Perl hackers—but Perl is more likely to evolve into a support, patch, or maintenance role. Not many greenfield projects in it. I work on a 20 year-old application and am paid rather well. It’s not much fun most of the time because it’s largely just making payments on technical debt and having the same argument about the cost of a rewrite every six months or so. That said, “not much fun” in Perl is a hundred times better than “not much fun” in Java, etc.

> As the great and powerful LanX ...

From now on you'll be my ambassador to Canada!

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)
Je suis Charlie!}

PS: no telecommute, sorry! ;p

You got a very good reply from YourMother, an experienced programmer with a wide vision of the IT world.

Mine is from the other end of the food chain: I only program in Perl and i never investigated other languages due to time constraints and Real Life priorities.

I work as sysadmin (mostly in MSWin32 but i've recently put a feet on the Linux side of the $job) and I meet Perl even before my actual job. In these years I used Perl to automate most boring part of my job: OS management, web reporting interfaces, MSSQL automations and monitoring, XML manipulation, IIS management for thousands of sites, log analisys, quick hacks..

Beside of this I've developped some useful (to me) apps for profit and fun. This is a central word: fun. Perl still give me fun and the desire to learn more.

In this perspective I double ++ the YourMother sentence “not much fun” in Perl is a hundred times better than “not much fun” in Java, etc.

Perl can be useful in many many fields and offers always a quick way to get the problem solved and always the possibility to develop a quick hack into a more robust solution.

While I percive the fact that Perl is no more the top laguage it was a while ago, I also think, imho, that not all job offers are fashion victims and if you can offer a valid solution in Perl it will be as valid as other language ones.

Also in recent years Perl is somehow rebirthing in some field: many new web related projects are now valid and usable options (see PSGI specification and Plack implementation), interesting approach to parallel progrmming (see MCE by our estimated brother marioroy), many interesting stuff in electronic (Arduino, RaspBerrry) field..

This topic was discussed many times: I have bookmarked in my homepage two interesting thread.

• to valuable for a new Perl job by YourMother
• Learning Perl

Choose Perl, come out from anonymous's robe and good luck!

L*

So I can only beg you to please search the monastery...

If one can learn only 1 language due to time and job constraints, would Perl be the right choice?

Yes. Perl is the Swiss Army Chainsaw because it does everything and does it all well. No other single language IME can compete on those terms. There's no point repeating all the good reasons to use Perl here but given your restriction to learn just one language, Perl has to be the obvious choice.

If you can find time for a second language then that can be domain-driven and is probably going to be one of: C, Javascript, SQL, Go or (Larry help you) Java.

If one can learn only 1 language due to time and job constraints, would Perl be the right choice?

I think Java would be the most employable if you need a job, but you can always abandon your family, job, personal possessions, time spent creating nodes on what language to learn to make more time for perl learning. If you add up all the time spent waiting for the jvm to start your program you can read some perl books

Since the situation you describe is not possible it is not worth serious consideration.