I have observed for some time (the past 2 years I guess) that the number of job/contract ads requiring solid Perl development as a primary or secondary skill seems to be on the increase.

That is a good thing.

At the same time, companies doing the said hiring are having a hard time finding suitable developers.

That feels good in the short term - we're in high demand - but in the medium to long term it's very bad because company managament won't allow development teams to continue with a language/environment that is hard to hire for, no matter what the theoretical productivity benefits. (I know all about this from spending so long trying to push AOLServer based solutions with Tcl as the core language).

Poking around the stats section of a local job site, their graphs tell esactly the same story:

Jobnet : Job Trends : Perl

In the graphs you can see the number of Perl jobs advertised bottom out during 2001 and then increasing from then until now. The number of searches for Perl shows the inverse.

Now there are, of course, many ways to read these graphs. More people search for jobs outside their core strengths when they are out of work and more developers were out of work in 2001 than now!

Also of interest in the stats for other languages, Java job ads dropped again after 2001 while the percentage of searches also dropped. .NET job stats only go back to 2002, but have steadily increased since then (unfortunately the search stats for .NET appear flawed).

I don't really have a question here, but it would be interesting to hear if other people have noticed the same trend that I have.

Additionally, what can we do to increase the number of developers becomming skilled in Perl. For instance, one University lecturer tells me that many of his students ask him "Why aren't we learning Java instead of {language X}" where language X is any language that is not Java. How can we make Perl appear more attractive to students and course planners alike?

In reply to Popularity of Perl vs. availability of Perl developers by aufflick

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