[tpm] Perl as a career

[Antonio Sun]

Hi,

First of all, thank you all who have replied.

On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Adam Prime <adam.prime at utoronto.ca> wrote:

> Your language of preference does not need to define your career, unless you
> want it to.  Good programmers are always going to be in demand. . .

I 100% agree with you. But ironically, >99% of the employers/job
postings don't have such attitude. E.g., they need people have 5+
years of Java programming experiences when Java hadn't been popular
for over 3 years. I am mostly a C/C++ programmer, but have been
programming Perl since 1996, and keep on programming Perl and
improving my Perl Skills, e.g., OO/inheritance, etc, and I've been
maintaining CPAN modules since 2002. Still, good programming skills
does not equal to good demands for newcomers like me.

> . . .

> . . .  If anything, developing websites with perl has been
> getting easier, which has been bringing people back into that realm.  I have
> been doing web development with perl for about 10 years, the bulk of that
> using mod_perl/apache, . . .

10 years, hmm... maybe it is time to look around and see what is out
there now. No offense, I just want to point out how easily to do web
programming in Php (or Java) nowadays. E.g., anyone knows a Perl based
framework that has seamless integration with AJAX? From DB schema to
basic data entry/browse web forms with advanced AJAX support, it won't
take me more than 2 hours to do so in PHP, and I don't consider myself
a good PHP programmer.

On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Martin at Cleaver.org <Martin at cleaver.org> wrote:

> Is Perl 6 going to include a Rails- or Zend- like Framework?
> It's neither PHP nor Ruby that makes those languages popular, it's the
> frameworks that reduce the ensuing software complexity.

Bingo. 100% agree.

On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 3:55 PM, Viktor Pavlenko <vvp at cogeco.ca> wrote:

> perl is not only web application development but a powerful general
> purpose programming language. Although my main language of employment
> has been C++ for the last 10 years or so, I have used perl
> occasionally and there is no substitute for it.

Yep, same here. That's why I feel sad that most Perl jobs are web
developing jobs.

On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 3:02 PM,  <arocker at vex.net> wrote:

> I don't think there is any such thing as a career in IT any more: the
> technology changes too quickly, and the schooling industry keeps turning
> out cheap replacements for you. If you do it as an adjunct to some other
> trade or profession (e.g. banking or accounting), you'd better be
> identified with that rather than computing, if you don't want to be
> replaced when when some new technology becomes the flavour of the month.

Again, 100% agree. that's why I asked what kind of industry that you
guys works in.

Thanks again everyone.

Cheers

Antonio