As some of you may know, I live in the USA but have been searching for work in Europe for quite some time. My brother who lives in Britain and my father who lives in Germany have both told me that they (both programmers) have never even heard of Perl. In fact, in a recent e-mail, my father said the following about Perl:
I asked [the programmers] here in our IS dept. but they've never heard of it. What web programming is done here is generally not done in IS but by guys like me and it's all Borland's JBuilder Ver. 3.
JBuilder? Ick. Stuck in the land of Java (though I wouldn't mind checking that out myself -- don't hate me, please).

From the e-mail snippet above, aside from the extreme difficulties of US citizens getting work in Europe without a work permit, I'm now beginning to suspect that my primary skills are useless! Does anyone know of how common Perl is around the world? Is it called different things in different languages? Particularly, I wonder what it might be called in German, as I can reply more effectively to my father's e-mail.

On a side note, any European PerlNuns wanna marry a cute, French speaking Geek from Oregon? :) Um, that was a joke, folks.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
(kudra: Perl exists here too) RE: Worldly Monks
by kudra (Vicar) on Aug 04, 2000 at 20:48 UTC
    All YAPC::Europe tickets sold out in the same month they started being sold. Perl is certainly known and used in Europe--your father and brother just work for sucky companies ;)

    kudra, who was asked to learn Perl as part of a job...

[reply]

      All yapc::europe tickets sold out within a week of going on sale.

      Perl is certainly heavily used in Europe. Check out the local Perl Monger groups if you need any more local help.

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

      European Perl Conference - Sept 22/24 2000, ICA, London
      <http://www.yapc.org/Europe/>
[reply]
(Corion) Perl Usage in Germany (.de)
by Corion (Patriarch) on Aug 04, 2000 at 20:48 UTC

    From my experience, Perl usage simply varies with the field in which you program. If you have a programming job that is UI centric, or centered about almost anything other than text / file processing, you won't hear of Perl much. If you are an administrator or web designer/programmer, you will hear about Perl every day.

    I think that there is not much difference between .de and the rest of the world here. Getting work here should be relatively easy if you have the "right" skills, as we now also have green cards, which are more or less something like the famous B1 visa over there - you have to be paid a salary of USD 50,000 / year or have a doctorate to be eligible for such a job - guess what the russian printers are now printing instead of dollar notes :).

    Perl is called "Perl" in German as well :-) But I also know people who've never heard of Perl ...

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RE: Worldly Monks
by Melvin (Beadle) on Aug 04, 2000 at 22:08 UTC
    I'll second Corion's post about Germany, I currently live/study/work here, as an American. As a student, finding work is easier than a full time position, but there are definetly some hoops to jump through. I've found that if you have the skills to work here, any company worth their salt will find a way to get you an 'Arbeitserlaubnis' (work permit).

    The introduction of a german "Green Card" system recently has made it even easier to find work over here, but they're really after IT workers from India/Pakistan/etc, not so much from the US or Britain because we demand much higher salaries.

    As for Perl/Linux/Open Source awareness over here, I've found that the people here are almost MORE into the whole Linux/Open Source movement as back home. Of course, that could have something to do with the fact that Freiburg is a university city, but I have yet to run into someone who hasn't at least installed a linux box at home.

    And FWIW, I use perl and php exclusively at work.

    Mel

    (Feel free to email me if you have any questions about my work experiences over here. Germany is an incredible country, I love it over here. =)

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RE: Worldly Monks
by toadi (Chaplain) on Aug 06, 2000 at 17:20 UTC
    Actually I'm a european(Belgium) and I program in the language which
    I prefer. Why you ask ... because I'm the only programming geek
    at the web-development department.

    They can't give a damn in what I program so long it works.
    This attitude actually disturbes me. Because -ok- I program in
    perl, but when I leave who's going the maintaine my ugly documented
    code that I still haven't documented because of no time(well
    you see I'm the only programmer while there are 3 man needed)

    But when I went job-hunting in web-development in Belgium everything
    you need to know is *yuck* IIS and ASP. That's why I'm going to
    change from department and going to write app's for the unix-admins...
    To automate some system-managment...

    In my opinion I think there are a many needs for good developers and
    when you are good enough you can tell what tools you want to use.

    --
    My opinions may have changed,
    but not the fact that I am right

[reply]

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