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

[Chris Prather]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 3:07 PM, Gypsy Rogers <gypsy at freeq.com> wrote:

> But, yes, I will take that thought in that yes, I could probably hire a low
> in php guy and teach him perl, they are very similar languages. So, now
> instead of weighing the option of php vs perl for a direction of my company,
> I will add to my option list (php guys learning perl). More to think on, oh
> boy. :P
>
> Perl is to PHP as FreeBSD is to Linux, and I haven't dropped FreeBSD yet
> either. :P
>
> (btw: I know at least one other company locally who is in the midst of the
> exact same decision point, I know this because the owner of that company and
> I have been talking at length, both of us weighing our options)

I worked at one large corporation that trained overseas Java
programmers to work on their Perl code base, and I worked with another
that was seriously considering it. The problems they had weren't
language related but more organizational, outsourcing is hard.

I personally find that the people coming into #moose with a background
in C++, Java, Haskell, OCaml, CLOS or some other "esoteric" language
tend to be able to grasp some concepts faster than people who have a
long history with Perl. Most kids fresh out of college know Java, C,
or Pascal (or some combination of those), having them learn to use
modern Perl idioms would be interesting and would grow the local Perl
market for talent.

-Chris