Any such change is more likely to less people are using Dice and more people using jobs.perl.org. To post a job to Dice for 30 days, you pay over $350. To post to jobs.perl.org, you fill out an email. It's hardly surprising that the one that costs money is losing.

The trouble with all these reports is that they don't explain, or can't explain, what a job is. Did they remove the same job posted multiple times because it could not be filled or because they posted it with different text to target it to different people? Was Perl merely listed as a skill among many in the shotgun approach, or was it the major skill the employer needed? Was the job actually a Perl job, or was it a bait-and-switch (which I've seen enough to not discount)? What is 12%, anyway? Let's see the hard numbers and the long term fluctuations.

However, a drop in job postings is not a drop in demand for Perl skills. It's a drop in demand for new employees with that skill. They still keep their current employees who still have that skill. I get to talk to a lot of very big companies as I try to sell Stonehenge services, and the most common answer I get is that they aren't hiring new people (so they don't need Learning Perl courses). To put the numbers into perspective, I want to put them next to the general trend in hiring.

Perl is far from dead. Instead of job postings, which I consider more an indicator of economic cycles, I like to look at the activity on CPAN. There are several new modules every week, and there are several new people asking for PAUSE IDs every week. People are doing things in Perl.

Business are still putting their money behind Perl too. At Stonehenge, we've had to expand quite a bit just to handle the load this year. O'Reilly is putting money into a new edition of Learning Perl which comes out next month. Apple Computer invited Randal and I (among others) to speak at WWDC about Perl. TPF got a $70,000 grant from NLnet for work on Parrot.

Perl doesn't seem dead to me.