in reply to Can Perl be more than a hobby language?

You don't have to pick a single language. Learn Perl and Java and C. No matter what you pick, you can always change later, and the most valuable programmers have experience in several environments.

If you are just starting your career, don't make bets on what will make a lot of money five years from now. Plenty of Perl will be around, but that doesn't mean anything to future earning potential. Get a good education and learn as much as you can so you have options.

You might have trouble getting Perl jobs due to geography, but if you live in the right places, plenty of big companies will snap you up if you have Perl skills. Indeed, recruiters will hound you if you're good enough (although that's more of a curse than a blessing :) ).

Update: I guess I should answer the question: Perl has never been a hobby language. It's always been a practical, get-real-work-done language.

--
brian d foy <brian@stonehenge.com>
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Re^2: Can Perl be more than a hobby language?
by tubaandy (Deacon) on Nov 15, 2006 at 17:09 UTC
    I also agree with Brian. Perl should be in your toolbox. There will be times when you will find that perl is a better tool than Java or C, and times when it isn't. Just like you don't pound nails in with a screwdriver. I have advocated scripting knowledge for engineers for many years now (and not just CSEs).
    tubaandy
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Re^2: Can Perl be more than a hobby language?
by pajout (Curate) on Nov 15, 2006 at 16:18 UTC
    Yes, I agree. If you will start C/C++ learning, other languages will be relatively easy :).

    My additions - detail knowledge of languages is not enough, imho:

    (X)HTML, JavaScript, CSS, if you want to do something related with web.
    SQL and related languages, if you want to do something with databases.
    XML family, if you want to do something with XML.

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      Not sure what do you mean by "relatively" but teaching Prolog or a functional language to someone who's only seen C/C++ is, sometimes very, hard. I remember all those seasoned coders (or rather walking C code generators) unable to grok that a program doesn't have to be a list of instructions to follow, but might very well be just a detailed list of relations between the ... erm ... two or more things. Since Prolog predicates work both ways, you do not have input and output parameters. Prolog predicates define the relation between some X and Y so if you specify X, you get Y and if you specify Y you get X. So ... do you want to split a list in two or merge two lists to one ...

      Just like learning French and Spanish will help fairly little in later learning Czech or Russian and even much less in learning Japanese, learning one or 1.5 languages will not necessarily help much with languages that are really different.

      Jenda
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[reply]
        Yes, I did not described it exactly. I'v mentioned procedural languages.

        Good programmer can write fortran program in any language :>))

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