[DFW.pm] Should I take a Perl job?

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Thu Sep 8 14:12:58 PDT 2011


On Thu, Sep 08, 2011 at 03:28:19PM -0500, Brand Hilton wrote:
> I used to do a lot of Perl, but I've been doing mostly Java for a few years
> now.  I now have an opportunity to do Perl again.  I love Perl, but I'm
> concerned that maybe it's not a good career move.  Any thoughts?

>From all of the studies I've seen, although Perl might have "decreasing 
market share" (percentage of market) in languages, it still very much 
has an "increasing market size" (number of jobs and companies using Perl).
Indeed, the rate of increase is itself reported to be increasing.

I don't think doing Perl is at all a bad career move.  If you have Perl
on your resume, then people generally know that you can make a transition
to many other languages without too much difficulty.  Indeed, I've heard 
several reports where Google has been hiring Perl programmers because of
their Perl experience (but then puts them to work on Python-based projects).

Pm


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