Is Perl losing its shine as it now needs to compete with many other alternative programming languages? Can Perl be considered a good career choice today? To find out, we have interviewed an experienced Perl developer and Geekuni founder Andrew Solomon….
Q. Do you see Perl as a good career choice today? In other words, would Perl be something to be considered as a worthwhile career choice today for a recent graduate or someone with no programming experience?
Solomon: These are actually three quite separate questions. The first question – Is Perl a good career choice? Definitely. There are quite a few jobs requiring competence in Perl, and the salary is excellent because Perl developers are hard to find.
La commedia illumina Firenze on the wall of Florence Cathedral, Santa Maria del FioreWhy is it hard to find Perl developers? This is because Perl is very rarely part of a university’s curriculum. To understand why this is, let’s first consider what programming really is. A software developer’s brain works on various levels, like in Dante’s Comedy they design in a very pure and abstract ‘Paradiso’ of algorithms, data types and architectures, descending into the ‘Purgatorio’ of writing code and further into the ‘Inferno’ of bending and corrupting the language to achieve their most ambitious expressions of creativity….
