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In article <dNydnY1caOF0kh_NnZ2dnUVZ_r->,
Ignoramus7380 <> wrote:

> Let me first state that I a perl user, since 1996, I have been always
> very happy with perl. I have written 1,430 perl scripts and modules. I
> am self employed and make most of my income from websites that I wrote
> using mod_perl.
>
> So this is not some kind of "perl suxxx" troll. Rather, I want to ask
> if perl will continue to be a viable ecosystem. I have a lot invested
> in and relying on perl and I have a vested interest in having perl to
> be a great platform.
>
> Lately, I have been seeing a lot of evidence that adoption and use
> of perl declines in favor of superficially "easier" languages. The
> number of developers, commits, activity etc seems to be dropping. Even
> this newsgroup seems to be declining faster than Usenet in general.
>
> My question is, should I be concerned by this trend or not?
> Ultimately, I do not care super that much that perl is number one
> scripting language, only that it continues to be a great platform.
>
> Thanks
>
> i

What are you trying to accomplish by posting here? Do you have a
perl-specific problem you're trying to solve (other than venting your
job insecurities)? I've been doing technology since the early 1980s.
I've been through PDP-11s, VAXes, SUNOS, and Solaris. Perl runs on all
these platforms as well as my MacOS X system.

You write Perl for a living. When that ceases to be a viable living,
you'll do something else. What's the problem?

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>>>>> "Ignoramus15392" == Ignoramus15392 <> writes:

Ignoramus15392> The problem is that I already have a bunch of perl stuff
Ignoramus15392> and I want to make sure that it will continue to run
Ignoramus15392> years ahead. I also want all latest and greatest stuff
Ignoramus15392> like imagemagick to continue being supported in perl.

There are more people coding Perl today than there were 15 years ago
during the dotcom boom "when Perl Ruled the Web".

There is more activity on the CPAN today than there has ever been.

There is more activity on Perl releases today than ever (new minor
releases every three months!).

Perl 6 is slowly maturing, bringing in a whole new audience.

Perl is alive and well. More people are using it, every day. In fact,
I know employers that cannot *hire* enough Perl programmers for both
legacy and new projects. So it's a seller's market if you know Perl.

print "Just another Perl hacker,"; # the original

--
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See http://methodsandmessages.posterous.com/ for Smalltalk discussion

In article <>,
Ignoramus15392 <> wrote:

> On 2012-10-20, Michael Vilain <> wrote:
> > In article <dNydnY1caOF0kh_NnZ2dnUVZ_r->,
> > Ignoramus7380 <> wrote:
> >
> >> Let me first state that I a perl user, since 1996, I have been always
> >> very happy with perl. I have written 1,430 perl scripts and modules. I
> >> am self employed and make most of my income from websites that I wrote
> >> using mod_perl.
> >>
> >> So this is not some kind of "perl suxxx" troll. Rather, I want to ask
> >> if perl will continue to be a viable ecosystem. I have a lot invested
> >> in and relying on perl and I have a vested interest in having perl to
> >> be a great platform.
> >>
> >> Lately, I have been seeing a lot of evidence that adoption and use
> >> of perl declines in favor of superficially "easier" languages. The
> >> number of developers, commits, activity etc seems to be dropping. Even
> >> this newsgroup seems to be declining faster than Usenet in general.
> >>
> >> My question is, should I be concerned by this trend or not?
> >> Ultimately, I do not care super that much that perl is number one
> >> scripting language, only that it continues to be a great platform.
> >>
> >> Thanks
> >>
> >> i
> >
> > What are you trying to accomplish by posting here? Do you have a
> > perl-specific problem you're trying to solve (other than venting your
> > job insecurities)? I've been doing technology since the early 1980s.
> > I've been through PDP-11s, VAXes, SUNOS, and Solaris. Perl runs on all
> > these platforms as well as my MacOS X system.
> >
> > You write Perl for a living. When that ceases to be a viable living,
> > you'll do something else. What's the problem?
> >
>
> The problem is that I already have a bunch of perl stuff and I want to
> make sure that it will continue to run years ahead. I also want all
> latest and greatest stuff like imagemagick to continue being supported
> in perl.
>
> i

The longer you work the more you'll realize that this sort of thing is a
pipe dream. Eventually the finely wrought system you spent years
writing will be decommissioned when the site or company that's using it
move to another platform. Or the legacy system is mothballed.

Death and taxes are the only things that are permanent. And they both
forms of entropy. And even entropy isn't what it used to be.

Unless you control all aspects of a system, you don't really control
it's growth or change. Learn to dance on shifting sands. Take up
basket weaving or Tibetan sand mandalas.

And write the best, most open-architecture code you can. Until someone
changes something out from under you and you have to do it again. And
again. Be glad you're not pushing a rock up a hill every day.

--
DeeDee, don't press that button! DeeDee! NO! Dee...
[I filter all Goggle Groups posts, so any reply may be automatically ignored]

In article <>,
(Randal L. Schwartz) wrote:

> >>>>> "Ignoramus15392" == Ignoramus15392
> >>>>> "<> writes:
>
> Ignoramus15392> The problem is that I already have a bunch of perl stuff
> Ignoramus15392> and I want to make sure that it will continue to run
> Ignoramus15392> years ahead. I also want all latest and greatest stuff
> Ignoramus15392> like imagemagick to continue being supported in perl.
>
> There are more people coding Perl today than there were 15 years ago
> during the dotcom boom "when Perl Ruled the Web".
>
> There is more activity on the CPAN today than there has ever been.
>
> There is more activity on Perl releases today than ever (new minor
> releases every three months!).
>
> Perl 6 is slowly maturing, bringing in a whole new audience.
>
> Perl is alive and well. More people are using it, every day. In fact,
> I know employers that cannot *hire* enough Perl programmers for both
> legacy and new projects. So it's a seller's market if you know Perl.
>
> print "Just another Perl hacker,"; # the original

Listen to this man. He's been around so many blocks, it's as if he
inspired INCEPTION.

--
DeeDee, don't press that button! DeeDee! NO! Dee...
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(Randal L. Schwartz) writes:

[...]

> Perl 6 is slowly maturing, bringing in a whole new audience.

For the kind of problems I need to handle, Perl 6 (or actually any
other bytecode-based language designed by 'witz kidz' from
academistan) is DOA: If it can't do deterministic automatic memory
management and possibly, can't actually manage any resources
automatically except memory and possibly, can't even do that (as I've
learnt by painful experience, 'resource leak' is the middle name of
the JVM which leaks just about everything that can be leaked, memory
explicitly included) -- and I'm not going to put a large amount of
effort into code written for language XYZ only to discover that the
planks I needed to build on sink as soon as you leave familiar
waters (and, as usual for 'open source projects' with the errors being
ignored side effects of intentional design descision nobody who
doesn't want to mainain the thing all by itseld can fix) -- I can as
well code in C instead.

'Mark and sweep' garbage collections marks everything which contains
it as "This is a toy for people who enjoy playing around with their
'great ideas' but shrink back from anything resembling actual work
because it bores them. Use at your own risk". Coinicidentally, I
write code which solves completely boring problems but it has do so
reliably: The computer is an infrastructure device and ideally, nobody
would ever notice that it is even there because the only way to do so
is when it fails to work.

On Saturday, October 20, 2012 11:43:41 AM UTC-4, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
> Perl is alive and well. More people are using it, every day. In fact,
> I know employers that cannot *hire* enough Perl programmers for both
> legacy and new projects. So it's a seller's market if you know Perl.

I meet people from time to time who work or have worked in technology, and after a while we get around to talking about Perl. I'm always surprised (even though I shouldn't be by now) when they say that they use(d) Perl. It really is surprising how often that turns up.

By the same token, most languages are 'dying'. For example, over the past several years, I have become heavily invested in Common Lisp. This is a verypowerful and mature language, yet has the reputation of a dead language like Latin, something with a wonderful past but no present or future. Still, Common Lisp has domains where it can't be beat and still has features that other languages haven't even thought of. According to popular wisdom, Lisp is dead, but the popular wisdom is just wrong.

Randal, I keep my finger on the pulse of the job market, and all I see are jobs in .NET, Java jobs, and a goodly number of Python and PHP jobs. Perl jobs seem to be mostly six month contracts. I trust that you know what you're talking about, but I don't see it, probably because I don't have your connections. If one were to look for Perl jobs, where do you suggest that one start?

Thanks, CC.

>>>>> "cc" == ccc31807 <> writes:

cc> Randal, I keep my finger on the pulse of the job market, and all
cc> I see are jobs in .NET, Java jobs, and a goodly number of Python
cc> and PHP jobs. Perl jobs seem to be mostly six month contracts. I
cc> trust that you know what you're talking about, but I don't see
cc> it, probably because I don't have your connections. If one were
cc> to look for Perl jobs, where do you suggest that one start?

YAPC::NA. I thought Asheville in 2011 was insane with the number of
people hiring. And then in Madison in 2012, I realized it could be MORE
insane.

(To be honest, one of the reasons that in my perception Perl is thriving
but it's still damn hard to find a Perl job is that Perl, and especially
CPAN,are extremely powerful levers that can even be applied to
themselves. If there's a common problem pattern in Java, often the best
that can be hoped for is some scaffolding and template code to be added
to Eclipse, and as there's no CPAN-equivalent, most developers who run
into that problem wind up solving it again. With Perl, it's very likely
that such a problem will be solved a couple times badly by people
feeling their way around it, and then someone smart solves it well and
shares the solution - either internally to his or her colleagues at that
company, or on CPAN for the entire world to benefit.)

Charlton



--
Charlton Wilbur