In the past 10 years, I've worked for a handful of companies, in even more positions. In each position, I've used Perl, and Perl has made my work easier. But except for a 10 week gig, I've never been hired as a Perl programmer, nor was Perl knowledge necessary to land the job.

Abigail

I'll have to agree with Abigail-II too. I currently use perl, VB, VC++, tcsh, PowerBuilder (yes, I think we're the ONLY shop in the Air Force still using it, but we do), and InstallShield. When any new task comes up, the first question I ask myself is, "How can I do this in perl?" followed by, "Would it be quicker to code and more efficient on the CPU to use something else?" Then I make my case for doing it in perl (usually with a prototype already built in perl) to the management, assuming the answer to the latter question isn't a resounding yes. I'm slowly getting perl into the business rules here (it didn't exist around here before I showed up).

The key to any good resume is showing experience and flexibility. Again, the key used around here before I showed up was PowerBuilder, which I had absolutely no experience in (not that I claim any experience with it 18 months later), but I got the job because of experience and a shown flexibility to learn.

Having said that, it's neat to find out that Amazon uses perl along with BankOne and MasterCard. I already knew about Motorola, along with Boeing, Lockheed Martin, GE, and General Dynamics.

The Air Force uses Perl? That's cool!

Just don't get crazy and code up something like Nukem or Weapons::MassDestruction. ;-)

I have to agree with Abigail-II on this one. In my current job I use perl, VB, Java, C++, ksh, and Cobol (yes even Cobol) depending on the project. I use perl more then anything at the moment, but will occasionally go for weeks or a month without perl. Knowing perl is great, knowing serveral other languages to diversify your resume is better. Of course, if you manage to convince your boss that perl is the best tool for every job, good for you :)

"Pain is weakness leaving the body, I find myself in pain everyday" -me

• Motorola uses Perl to test upgrades to their cellular network infrastructure. (My code was used at Ground-Zero to look for cell signals.)
• MasterCard uses Perl/Apache/MySQL to power one of their most visible web applications for corporate customers.
• BankOne uses Perl to load all its Stock and Bond processing. (Over 5_000_000 records per night)

Most web companies use Perl. They may not admit it, but they do.

I would add that Amazon uses HTML::Mason (a powerful perl application).

Neil Watson
watson-wilson.ca

The main problem is not that Perl suffers from this or that. Their main concern is about finding a future job where they can see Java everythere in jobs announces, and no Perl at all.

Java enjoys this buzzword status because Sun Microsystems puts marketing effort into making it so. Perl is probably more widely used than Java, but less effort goes into marketing Perl. (In fact, about the only marketing Perl gets (aside from word of mouth) is from O'Reilly, and their main goal is to sell books.)

Your coworkers will find that in future jobs, they will use Perl, even if it isn't listed on the job description. The real-world experience in Perl will be useful in the real world -- quite possibly more useful than the equivalent experience in Java, from a practical perspective. It is not for nothing that Perl has been called "a language for getting your work done" and "the duct tape of the internet" and "practical", among other things.

If you're looking to beef up your resume and get Java listed on there, one way is to get some kind of paper certification. Doesn't Sun offer something of that sort? If they don't, I'm sure someone else does. While you're at it, pick up a Microsoft .Net certification too. (Even better would be a computer science degree, but that takes longer and costs more. Go for the certifications.) Certification in Java plus three years job experiece developing a large web application will look just as good on a resume as three years developing a Java application, I would think.

As far as what technology is right for the company to use, I would think that the important things would be how well it works, how easy it is to maintain, and how easy it is to find and hire people who can work on it. Perl seems like a pretty good choice. I don't think your company should change its core technology just to improve employee resumes. If they want to offer some resume-building stuff for employees as a benefit, how about sending people to seminars and stuff? A lot of companies do that. Some even pay for certification courses. Your job experience will still show up on the resume as job experience, even if the details of the type of work aren't *exactly* the same as the job you're applying for.

As far as serious, well-known applications that are written in Perl, Bugzilla and SpamAssasin seem obvious, but I'm frankly not sure how that's relevant to the rest of your post.

As far as Perl not seeming "sexy" to the young people these days, that's partly because Perl5 is relatively old tech. A lot of us don't *remember* Perl 4. When Perl6 comes out, expect some renewed excitement.

$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$ ;->();print$/
[download]

A lot of companies are listed already by others, so I'll point to "some" applications. Of course, the best way to find out is using freshmeat and browse by category Perl :)

That will list a massive ammount of applications written in Perl, but to make life a little easier, I'll list a few that come to mind:

• Majordomo
• SpamAssassin
• mrtg
• Bugzilla
• pgpenvelope

Thanks for your answer but these are apps that won't help anyone to find a job.

i was thinking of commercial apps that need some integration work, just like Interwoven Teamsite for example
I found one of my last job in an internet web agency because they won a project of Interwoven integration and needed some Perl skills because the Interwoven API is written in pure Perl
Anyone knows some other examples of this kind of App ?

Christophe

"Apache is the industry-leading Web server, 
and when coupled with the embedded mod_perl 
interpreter, we can achieve the high performance 
our applications need with quick development 
times that the Perl programming language provides."
[download]

Talking about Slashdot... Isn't Slashdot itself running on Perl? Slash? It sure looks that way...