I was very thankful, when doing an Electrical Engineering degree at university, that the Software Engineering course(s) I did were based largely in C (where a specific language was applied) and not in some other more obscure languages.

I wouldn't be encouraging universities to be conducting courses in Perl; universities are supposed to produce graduates with no practical abilities, but with a lot of good theoretical grounding on why things are done the way they are. I view Perl as a pragmatic language, but not a good teaching language, not when it comes to fundamentals.

In terms of advocating Perl, this is a tough one. For several years I resisted Perl because it just didn't make a lot of sense at first glance. When I started in web programming PHP had its appeal because it seemed an awful lot like C..

When I found myself developing real-world web apps, however, that had to talk to a variety of telecommunications equipment and databases and produce results in web form, I found myself experimenting with a few approaches. C++/OracleSQL, PHP, and then one day Perl.

My ongoing problem with PHP was that it took forever to start the interpreter - which was no good for CPU intensive cron jobs. My problem with C++ was that it took a long time to write (but I always get a thrill compiling anything to assembler!).

Perl, however, loaded so quickly! Finally here was an interpreter that didn't need to load 100s of modules just to start up. The use keyword was what converted me, and I paid more attention to Perl; now I am in love with the language, and it ranks almost equal with C and assembler as my languages of passion.

The thread, however, is about businesses and demand for Perl programmers; indeed it is hard (in Sydney) to find serious Perl enthusiasts. And I agree, as a contractor, it is a very good thing to be in demand. And I also agree it is a risk to a business to be based in a language that has a light potential employee base.

Having said that, though, any company finds it difficult to attract great staff. If Perl is a language that tends to be adopted by those who know what they want in a computer language then a company is going to have the same resourcing problems if they are looking for good staff..