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*