

The present and future of Perl in the job market - cvertonghen
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/perl-modperl/200903.mbox/browser
there's a fantastic thread ("decline and fall of modperl?") going on about the now and future of Perl in the jobmarket. Absolute must-read for everyone involved professionally with Perl.
======
esila
The start of this thread is some FUD raised not by the actual thread starter,
but a customer expressing concerns about web development and web frameworks
here:

Hi and sorry for the provocative title of my post :)

One of our customers is doing a detailed review of a mason/modperl ERP app
we've built for them since 2001. Prodded by some buzzword-compliant
consultants they are expressing concerns that the app's underlying
technologies - perl, modperl and mason - are becoming obsolete. They feel that
a web application framework must have 'rails' or some other buzzword in its
name.

But their main argument is that perl is declining as a web developement
language. Also they rightly feel that competent perl developers are becoming
harder to find.

What arguements could I use to address these concerns and convince them that
their initial investement in perl is still safe and won't be obsolete in 10
years?

The client's local developers (who maintain the app we've built) feel that
mason gives too much freedom to write messy code and badly structure a web
app.

Indeed mason has very little constraints, maybe just slightly more than
straight modperl. So it requires experienced, self-disciplined devs, which are
few and far between.

So my second question is, what perl web development framework should we
recommend to our client? Catalyst looks like a winner, but maybe there are
others?

Thanks for your insights,

\--

This is not really about Perl in the "jobmarket" - just in web development and
how it seems to "be behind" against all the cool buzzwordy frameworks out
there.

~~~
m0nty
I have some ten years learning and experience invested in perl, and at the
moment I'd basically agree with your consultants. I haven't been hired solely
for perl since 2003 (it was a web development gig) and I was musing just
yesterday that I probably never would be again. I'm just a dinosaur in a world
of fleet-footed MVC-wielding agile mammals ;) So I agree with your
consultants: although perl is far from finished, it's not ideal for web dev
work.

Having looked at Catalyst I'm not impressed - just look at their documentation
(which seems to be a series of PODs) and compare it with Django, which has
tutorials, detailed docs, etc. I'm no fan of Rails, so maybe Django is a
better way to go? Django is very structured, very MVC (almost) and plays
nicely with your HTML coders.

Whenever I have worked on a perl project which someone else has started, it's
always been a hideous mess. Rather than fight to keep things as they are, if I
were in your position I'd agree wholeheartedly with the consultants, except
their conclusion - just name another successor product apart from Rails and
make a strong case for it. (Although I'm sure there are plenty of people here
who would defend Rails and I'm not looking for an argument with them.)

~~~
chorny
You should try CGI::Application (Titanium) - it's simple. For Perl code
cleaning try Perl::Critic and perltidy.

------
neilk
One of the posters (Lupe Christoph) turns to job board statistics to show that
Perl is doing okay, but I think this is a poor measure. The ideal language for
popularity in job board stats would be a legacy language; one that is
attracting few new developers but is vital to some part of operations. Sadly I
think Perl is headed there, if it isn't there already.

I've worked with lots of young developers and they always know PHP, and they
never know Perl. Lots of people put Perl on their resume but it isn't deep
knowledge, it's just enough to script a cronjob or whatever.

You can argue all you want, but if the kids aren't learning it, your language
is dead.

------
forinti
You might not be able to get a job exclusively doing Perl hacking, but if you
know Perl you make your life a lot easier. My wife is an IT manager and even
she found Perl tremendously useful, beacuse she sometimes has to bang files
into different formats or weed through gigantic log files dispersed on
different servers.

~~~
cageface
That's equally true of all the scripting languages though. Python or Ruby will
handle those jobs just as well.

~~~
eru
Or Haskell. (With a little coercion.)

------
j2d2
Perl and, surpringly, Korn shell are still widely used through the financial
IT industry.

------
jbert
If I read that search correctly, it's saying that the number of threads about
mod_perl has declined.

That symptom is also affected by:

\- increasing maturity of mod_perl (fewer problems) \- a decrease in
apache/apache2 modperl/mod_perl2 discussions as apache2/mod_perl2 has become
dominant over that time period

