in reply to Re: Are Perl and the dynamic languages dead or what ?
in thread Are Perl and the dynamic languages dead or what ?

In fairness to managers, once someone makes the decision to use some particular language, that's the sort of programmer they hire. It's not that they don't get fired for hiring Java programmers, but that somewhere else someone decided to use Java. That's not an a priori bad decision, so I don't sweat that.

The other interesting note is that .NET and HTML were the big winners in the Dice report (and PHP was curiously absent, and I would really like to see those numbers). Since .NET was up 52% (but hey, going from 1 to 2 will do that), I'm curious about why that is.

What I'd really like to see from the tech jobs is a breakdown of what the tech workers are actually doing instead of what they are using. Since Microsoft pretty much rules the desktop for corporate workers, I expect that workers supporting those workers and their machines would be much more focused on .NET, Java, Visual Basic, and so on. I don't expect Perl to even be close to dominating that arena (just like I don't expect Linux to).

Once we segment "the market", I don't think these numbers will be all that surprising, or worrisome. Either way, I don't blame the managers, and I think using them as a scapegoat doesn't help anyone.

--
brian d foy <brian@stonehenge.com>
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Re^3: Are Perl and the dynamic languages dead or what ?
by neniro (Priest) on Jun 25, 2005 at 22:12 UTC
    Of course you're right that it isn't right to blame all of them as I did. But it's my personal opinion that a lot of people in management positions try to go the "safe" way. Nothing wrong about this, but in fact they don't decide they just follow the masses. Thats a general problem not just in programming. They are paid to find good solutions, but they just try to reduce the risk of their decisions and take the average solutions. That can be extremly annoying.
Re^3: Are Perl and the dynamic languages dead or what ?
by poqui (Deacon) on Jun 29, 2005 at 14:53 UTC
    "In fairness to managers, once someone makes the decision to use some particular language, that's the sort of programmer they hire."

    Not necessarily. I have worked at companies where even though the majority of the work is in Java, the management still hires ASP programmers or vice versa.

    We have requirements for Data Warehouse professionals, and we interview a lot of people who were managers at their last job and haven't touched code in years.