This weekend I popped my head into a career fair, and after chatting up the representative companies (150+ companies were bidding on about 30 or so booths), I walked away with some observations on how Perl is misunderstood in my community. On the chance that these experiences are slightly more universal, I thought I would share here.

1) Community Support
One of the main strengths of perl over some of those other languages is the community support, and I think just about everyone here understands this. Oddly enough, most of the people I talked with haven't heard of CPAN, let alone Perl monks. When I explained CPAN, especially, eyes lit up at the prospect.

2) C Interoperability
I took it as a positive sign that I saw more companies looking for C than C++ developers, but apart from my own personal preferences on that front, none of them seemed to realize that Perl is designed to work with both. As one of the reps said "sounds like a great prototyping language."

Two areas that were recognized strengths of Perl were in regular expression processing, and database connectivity. Perl still has a solid reputation as a language for getting something out of a database or a large text document, and performing all sorts of wonderful transformations on it. I think most reps were also relieved to hear a Perl advocate say that Perl may not be the best solution to all problems, even if it can provide an adequate solution to many.

I don't know how many of you have similar experiences, or if your own observations to share, but I thought it was nice to see that its core strengths are still recognized, and that the community standing behind the language will help keep it a useful tool for the future.

--starX
axisoftime.com

In reply to Witnessing for Perl by starX

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.