I mostly agree with you on your University comments. I am glad that my Computer Science study began with Pascal and from their went to C. The year after mine, Melbourne Uni Computer Science replaced Pascal with Miranda (a functional language) which I think is a capital idea - first teach students a less common (but powerful) approach before they get 'stuck' into procedural thinking so that they can see more than one way to do things.

Software Engineering courses these days contain higher level subjects these days like Web Engineering where concepts like online communities are discussed. The fastest way to play with online communities is certainly not C :) Courses like that are definately up for alternative approaches like Perl or OpenACS (as is used for that course).

FYI: I am based in Sydney myself these days, and your use of the term "enthusiast" is an important clarification. Developers or admins who know how to hack a short perl script are not the same as a Perl developer.

Another thing I should point out is that I also didn't use to consider myself a "Perl Developer" - candidates for hiring as a Perl developer can include people comfortable and experienced with good programming practises who have shown their adaptability to other languages. Unfortunately that skill is even harder to test than Perl skills!

In reply to Re^2: Popularity of Perl vs. availability of Perl developers by aufflick
in thread Popularity of Perl vs. availability of Perl developers by aufflick

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