The future of Perl? (Perl 6, employability)

Question

I've found a few related questions, like Python vs. Perl (now deleted) and Is Perl Worth it? (now deleted), but I can't seem to find anything that directly addresses this question.

Is there a legitimate future in Perl? I work in a Perl shop right now, and I came from PHP so I see some of the advantages of an arguably "lower" level language when doing things on the server-level, but it seems to me a lot of the tasks in Perl can be performed more quickly in PHP, and SOME ARGUE (subjective, not my opinion) that Python does these tasks in a more explicit way that's easier to maintain.

Is having this job on my resume ultimately going to make me less employable, especially if the language no longer grows?

A few notes:

1. I love Perl, so don't think I'm bashing the language. It's fun to use and we use a fairly verbose syntax that is relatively easy to maintain.
2. I realize that "Vaporware" is a buzzword that isn't necessarily applicable to this situation, because Perl doesn't have a marketing department and they're not "promising" Perl 6 by any date.
3. I realize that CPAN keeps the community going, so whether Perl 6 comes out or not people continue to build modules that increase possibilities in the language, but that doesn't mean that industry shops realize this, and switch to "more supported" languages that keep coming out with revised versions of the language like Python and (especially) PHP.*

EDIT {CLARIFICATION} Cade Roux and Telemachus both brought up good points about whether or not your future can be defined by your resume.

To be honest, this was brought up when one of my former employers said "I don't hire anyone with Perl as their last job. That's OLD technology." This was a PHP shop, so take all that with a grain of salt.

Now without defaming my former employer, she's not a tech person AT ALL, so she was really expressing an opinion of a layperson, and in this case my question was more along the lines of "Is there a stigma on this particular technology placed on it by people who don't utilize it?", specifically more along the lines of people who may have had past experience with similar employers. I'm not asking you to look into the future with a magic glass to assume what the next "hot" language would be, but rather if this particular language (which is accused of stunted growth, again by laypeople) has negative connotations placed upon it.

I hope that makes a little more sense.

Answer 1

• Plenty of shops - including on Wall Street - heavily use Perl and will continue to do so.

  However, I have never seen a PHP or Python used in this industry (not saying it is not used, but that I never encountered. Purely personal anecdote. Nor have I EVER heard any conversation of "Perl can not do X that Python can, let's use Python").

• Perl6 is irrelevant to job picture.

  • Many shops are still on 5.8 or G-d forbid 5.6

  • More importantly, perl5 continues to evolve, including with features/ideas from Perl6. See Perl 5.10 and 5.11

  • Plus evolution includes really cool framework like Moose etc...

I can probably come up with more bullets later, but the summary is that no, having a Perl job will in no way negatively affect your career prospects.

However, knowing nothing but Perl may affect it negatively, so make sure you know Java, C#, C++ or something besides dynamic interpreted languages. Not many shops would hire "Perl Only" developer, even if they gladly hire "Perl + other stuff" ones.

Answer 2

See Tim Bunce's Perl Myths slides on slide share.

In short, Perl is not dead and has lots of jobs available.

Answer 3

Anyone who actually watches the development of Perl, would know that that there has perhaps been more work on the Perl language in the past decade, than in the previous decade.

This has been spurred on by the introduction of Perl6.

---

The introduction of Perl 6 spurred on, the now deeply ingrained, testing culture.

Just look at how much the Rakudo implementation of Perl 6, is tested:

Rakudo Progress http://rakudo.de/progress.png

---

There has also been a lot of back-porting of Perl 6 features into Perl 5.

For example, the Perl 6 "switch" statement

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.10.1;
# or 
use feature qw'switch say';

my $str = "testing 123";

given( $str ){
  when(/(\d+)/){
    say $1;
  }
  when( [0..10] ){
    say $_, 'is equal to some number between 0 and 10';
    # given, sets the current topic "$_"
  }
}

Answer 4

There are few languages I would tie my career to. Perl will always be there and it will always be the best tool for certain kinds of jobs. But this is true for many languages. However, there are also languages which have more competition in some of the spaces where they are used. Perl is one language that has a lot more strong niches.

Still, you wouldn't restrict yourself to using just one language for your entire life - or even in one project if there are better options to solve a problem.

Career-wise, there are basic technologies which are fairly universally used, and of these I think a few of the most valuable are: relational database concepts and SQL, XML/HTML/HTTP/DOM, regular expressions. These are all basically independent of any particular vendor or language, and if you are strong in these areas, choice of language and platform are going to be informed by the problem being addressed.