in reply to Are we a dying breed?

It takes time to find good people. That's life. If you can't find good Perl people, then I'd suggest finding good people and teaching them Perl. (It doesn't take that long.)

As for the job situation out West, I don't know what 10 companies you're thinking of, but apparently at least 6 of them are in LA. (And that's not counting the companies that occasionally have a position from time to time.) My understanding from friends in other cities suggests that this is far from the only good local market.

As for Perl vs Java, judging from recent conversations on boston.pm, PHP is seen as a far more direct threat.

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Re^2: Are we a dying breed?
by xorl (Deacon) on Nov 14, 2005 at 13:58 UTC
    As for Perl vs Java, judging from recent conversations on boston.pm, PHP is seen as a far more direct threat.

    I agree. I code in both. I like both. However for what I do (web/database intergration) PHP is my 1st choice. Perl was the defact language for CGI and dynamic websites. Now PHP (and to some extent ASP) has replaced it. Perl has it's place for a lot of background tasks and for anything too complex for shell scripting.

    Java doesn't really compete with Perl (or PHP) in any of these places. I don't understand what all this Java vs. Perl stuff is about.

[reply]
      Different people, different jobs. For what I use Perl for (and have used Perl for for more than a dozen years), PHP is not an option. I don't do webby stuff. If I had to replace the stuff I've written in Perl by stuff written in another language, that other language would be shell, AWK or C. And whatever language I might have learn if I hadn't learned Perl. Python probably. Ruby maybe, but that's quite a newcomer. And had I learned Java, I might have written some of it in Java.

      But whether or not "perl is dying", I don't care. Perl exists. Even if no new versions appear, it doesn't cease to exist. And it won't stop doing what it's doing. It won't effect me, nor my job, if everyone else stops programming Perl.

      Perl --((8:>*
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