[Mpls-pm] Food for Thought, on Perl in the Minneapolis marketplace..

[Nicholas Melnick]

I suppose that ultimately, it's a matter of what you need accomplished  
and why. I'm self employed and freelancing here in Minneapolis, but I  
was in a few hiring positions while I was in Seattle. I found that I  
could get programmers of a higher caliber if I went with Perl  
developers over PHP developers. That being said, when we were hiring  
at a $30k-40k range, we'd certainly find many more PHP developers than  
Perl developers, but they were all pretty entry level, having either  
solid knowledge but no experience, or a lot of small experience but  
really inexperienced in creating maintainable, scalable designs. On  
average, a Perl programmer wants more money, but I've found that the  
contributions they make fall in line with what we had been paying  
them, minus one or two outliers.

There is a culture problem, though, that you really hit in your  
earlier email. A lot of these PHP devs whine and moan when they have  
to work on Perl, but that's because bad Perl tends to look worse than  
bad PHP in web development, because there are more built-in facilities  
in PHP that the base level kid can use and be familiar with. The PHP  
community and howto guides constantly use Perl as the example of  
"wrong", so it's almost taught to every one of them that Perl is a  
terrible language. In Perl, you can find someone using five different  
styles of web development, forking, and other nonsense, and I have  
seen many applications that have made me nearly swear off Perl myself.

Thing is, you can change culture. Perl was the top tool in the late  
90s and early 2000s, but it was swept aside by low barriers to entry  
(This would be PHP, and note the similarities to the Visual Basic  
onslaught in the 90s), or sex and framework (This would be Ruby). We  
have Moose, we have DBIx::Class, we have Catalyst, we have a semi-sane  
threading model now, and incredible system and framework support. No  
one out there is really creating a unified movement to change how  
people feel about Perl, and promoting excellent Perl code.

One thing I liked that Chris said was that it's hard to change the  
global perspective, but a culture can be changed here in the Twin  
Cities. In the late 90s, we had a booming culture of startups, but  
we're laying low now. Why not use this opportunity to promote Perl as  
an elegant, fast, rapid development language, at least here in the  
Cities?

  - Nick


On Oct 21, 2009, at 5:14 PM, Gypsy Rogers wrote:

>
> The short answer to the one question of definitions in my email is  
> that if I
> have a simple thing that needs to be developed for a web site that  
> task can
> at this time (in this culture) be accomplished cheaper by hiring a php
> programmer then by hiring a perl programmer 9 times out of 10.