the "no good Perl jobs"/"no good Perl programmers" myth

[Denny de la Haye]

On Mon, 2006-08-07 at 14:28 +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> Also, if there aren't decent Perl programmers who want to make websites,
> what stops said firms from recruiting smart programmers straight out of
> university (who don't yet know what they want to do) and teaching them Perl?

I think most programmers leaving uni now have probably at least dabbled
with PHP*, if they're (a) even slightly interested in making websites
and (b) smart enough to have started practising before they try to get a
job.  As they've learnt the basics of PHP, they'll apply for the
plentiful PHP jobs, and the Perl/CGI jobs will continue to be unloved
and unwanted.

Presumably there's some equilibrium point where most of the companies
who want to use Perl for websites either switch to PHP or go out of
business for lack of technical staff.  Might this leave Perl in a better
position for handling the more interesting, non-trivial non-website
jobs, or in a worse position because even fewer people will have heard
of it being used for solving real-world problems?

Personally I'm still fairly convinced there's a correlation between the
relative attitudes to newcomers of the PHP and Perl communities, and the
rise of one language and apparent decline of the other.  Whether this is
a good or bad thing is left as an exercise for the reader's personal
prejudices about ignorant beginners.


* originally I wrote PCP here for some reason.