[tpm] Perl as a career

[Liam R E Quin]

On Sat, 2009-03-07 at 12:35 -0500, Antonio Sun wrote:
[...]
> To me, Perl is the most powerful language, however, career-wise, I see most
> Perl jobs are maintaining web applications, whereas Perl lost its
> competitive edge over Php & Java.

Perl is a tool. Programming, systems administration, user support,
application design/architecture, problem analysis, sock washing,
those are all careers, although the boundaries between most of them
get fuzzy at times.

Perl 6 has been a long time coming, but may end up with a surge of
popularity for a while just like Ruby on Rails, Java, Cobol on Cogs,
etc.


> What do you think the percentage would be (web maintaining to all Perl jobs)?

Maintaining a Web site is something I do, and Perl is one of many
tools I use to do it.  Perl will likely have a long future in
the roles of system administration glue, database reporting and
text processing, regardless of whether it's for the Web or for
some organization-internal purpose.

If you're trying to decide whether to learn Perl, say so and you'll
get helpful advice :-) but answering in the general is not really
all that meaningful, I think.

best,

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - The barefoot programmer
XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
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