Well, I earn most of my money as a freelancer with Perl since 1998, and this may be more than the average german earns.

My main task is moving and synchronizing data between different systems for building metadirectories (there CPAN with the whole modules is the best reason for doing it with Perl). There are several tools for synchronizing data for a metadirectory (Siemens, IBM, ...), but they usually take one object from a source, do a mapping to the data, search one object in the target, and update it somehow. This often works fine, but is slow. With Perl (or any other language) you can use better algorithms (e.g. searching for n objects in the target in one step) and get much more speed when working with large directories or the like.

Sometimes I control external application (e.g. Excel) with perl, or write some little administration GUIs with CGI/mod_perl or Tk.

I additionally do some perl training, and get more and more offers from companies to teach some of their people in programming perl.

But a good knowledge of C can be very helpful, at least for a better understanding what happens behind the curtains, or for rewriting functionality that would be too slow in Perl (XS, Inline::C) or to access external C libraries.

Best regards,
perl -e "s>>*F>e=>y)\*martinF)stronat)=>print,print v8.8.8.32.11.32"

In reply to Re: Can Perl be more than a hobby language? by strat
in thread Can Perl be more than a hobby language? by Alien

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.