Perl is dead

[Avleen Vig]

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 7:42 PM, Steve Mynott <steve at gruntling.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 06:42:14PM +0000, James Laver typed:
>
>> At risk of being somewhat london-centric, how many jobs have you seen
>> advertised for python down here recently?
>>
>> In the past year or so I've seen about 5 python jobs advertised (at least
>> that I've noticed). Alongside this there have been a large number of perl
>> jobs, a handful of ruby jobs and a surprisingly large amount of PHP jobs.
>
> Python seems more popular in the USA than UK from speaking with people at
> conferences.  There have been a small number of test framework-type python
> roles here but not many.
>
> I suspect Django may increase the number of python roles but Rails
> has been popular (as has Catalyst).  I like Python and I wish it
> were more widely used.

It's a singular datapoint, but to answer the "how many python jobs..",
I would ask "how many engineers has Google hired in London in the last
few years?
It's *one* job application with lots of hires, many of whom will have
to use python at some point.
Other companies have probably done the same.

But I don't believe the same is true with Perl.
Perl is fairly well entrenched. It's available everywhere. But Python
is still growing and has a lot of headroom.
Most people have tried Perl. The number trying Python and Ruby instead
is growing. Fast.

I like Python too and wish the same.
I like that is enforces structure. I'd donate a kidney if perl could
be made to do that.