[tpm] Fwd: [Boston.pm] Perl community "The Rising Costs of Aging Perlers"

[Abram Hindle]

On 13-07-23 10:15 AM, Adam Prime wrote:
> On 13-07-23 10:59 AM, arocker at Vex.Net wrote:
>> I agree with the article. I'd like to know how Python manages to attract
>> new recruits, because it doesn't seem to have the same problems.
>>
> From a hiring perspective, it's not easy to find "intermediate" "perl"
> people. It's pretty easy to find smart people with little to no perl.
> It's a little harder to find people in that camp that are interested
> and/or willing to learn perl. It's somewhat challenging to find people
> that are strong in perl and "senior", and it's even more difficult to
> find people like that that are actually looking for a job.

Last year I was lucky enough to hire an undergraduate research assistant
who knew perl and did some good perl work. This summer I hired two
undergraduate research assistants and one week after I hired them I had
to travel to a conference. The next day their commits consisted of them
porting the code base to python without asking me.

Now it is the main codebase and there is little I can do about it. It's
too late and the port allowed them to fix some issues that would've been
awkward in the old codebase. Thus I can't really complain. One of the
nice things is that they are using more OO in the design of the codebase
then with Perl. I think most Perl people don't know moose enough and
thus avoid the OO cruft because it is far too verbose without moose.

It will be very hard for me in the future to find undergraduates with
Perl experience, especially modern idiomatic perl,  at my institution,
so the python port from a people angle makes sense.

I just wish Python had the good sense to implement lexical scope and use
strict;

*sigh*

abram

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