I personally do not know any Lao or Thai programmers. At all. I know they are out there, but I'm not personally acquainted with any. I have casual acquaintance with a few who have dabbled in FoxPro, but they certainly did not do this for a living. I'm also aware that some universities nearby teach Java. Not being one of their students, I have no idea what else they might teach--probably they teach C++, Visual.NET, and perhaps Python? I would be highly surprised to find a Thai programmer of Perl, much less a Thai course in it. (I know several foreigners, however, who will be quite interested in my Thai module--and I would like for Thais themselves to have more tools that would interest them in Perl.)

This might shock you, but Windows XP is still in common use around here. Windows 7 is likely more common by now, but it should also be understood that I am not personally aware of a single Thai computer that I could confidently say runs an authentic (licensed) copy of Windows. It is not uncommon here to see a PowerPoint presentation before an audience interrupted by a message saying that the copy of Windows is not registered. People on this economy cannot generally afford genuine copies of Windows. Mind, I am not living in Bangkok where many more affluent people live.

You might walk into a school computer classroom in some places here and see desktop computers with floppy drives in them. In the more urban areas, you would not likely see this--but most of Thailand is rural. Sometimes their computer classrooms get stocked by the hand-me-downs of other schools--which are used until they can no longer be repaired. For both technical and student-management reasons, these computers may have no access to internet. The students' computer training in one school I visited last month consisted of learning the Windows Paint software--drawing pictures with it, and none of the computers in the classroom, except for that of the teacher, had internet access.

I would be highly surprised to find a Thai programmer of Perl

I used to work in London for a company called Venda, who had an office in Thailand with a large number of Perl programmers; I worked with a couple of them that had moved to the UK, and several more that visited. Around 2014 the company was bought by Netsuite (later absorbed by Oracle), who fairly promptly killed off the Perl product and moved everyone that stayed onto their own Java-based product.

That's quite interesting, thank you. But it leaves me with some lingering questions.

Were the programmers expats, Indians, Chinese, or some other non-indigenous group, or were they actually Thai? If they were Thai, how did they happen to learn Perl? Did the company provide their own training?

Blessings,

~Polyglot~