Programmer wages have little to do with how good/bad the language is at a particular task. They have to do with how difficult it is to find programmers who can code at the level needed by the employer.

Perl coders tend to be paid less because there are a lot of coders out there who can knock simple scripts together - and that's all a lot of people need. I would also guess that there is more Java work than perl work out there so resources are scarcer in the Java world.

If I was going to pick a language to learn that would give me the most renumeration it would be COBOL, since there are few people learning it and there is a lot of COBOL maintainance work out there.

Language choice on a project can have surprisingly little to do with whether the language is the best at solving a particular problem. It has more to do with buzzword compliance, the employers existing skill base and code base, etc. Perl is usually rejected for non-technical reasons in my experience.

That said, I do most of my professional coding in perl so it can pay some of the time :-) However, I am no language bigot and am happy to use other programming languages - and learn new ones all the time.

To survive in the commercial world you need a portfolio of skills - don't rely on a single language or you'll get bitten.

To increase the wages of perl coders encourage more perl work, and combat any FUD you see against the language.

(or remove other perl programmers from the work pool by a secret programme of assassination - but now I'm letting you into my secrets of success :-)

In reply to Re: Our future by adrianh
in thread Our future by nite_man

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.