Apparently, the price of perl jobs in London has been rising (operative quote: "close to 1999 levels"). At the same time, Perl's TIOBE ranking is falling (ComputerLanguageRankings). This sounds a lot like old COBOL programmers getting paid lots of money because not many people can COBOL really well (i.e. the economic effect of the Python Paradox).

Anyway, Larry says not to worry, We're not in that kind of a race. While he said that was back in 1999, we all know that hackers win in the end.

But will they be hacking in Perl?


Fine - you've convinced me. I'm going to rewrite my bluetooth device poller (http://svn.silfreed.net/bluetooth_dev_status/) in python instead of perl. It intially started in PHP to test PHP's maturity as a CLI scripting language, but I've recently run into too many problems dealing with daemonizing (i.e., it failed). So I was planning on rewriting in perl, but rewriting in a new language would probably be a better idea. -Doug
Forget python, use Ocaml. http://www.galois.com/cufp/slides/2006/YaronMinsky.pdf
I don't know if they will or not, but it's sad that Perl doesn't get any cred anymore. It really is a great language, but because it's not sexy and new and because Perl6 has languished for so long, I think it will likely go the way of COBOL. Mostly because a new generation of hackers will come along and grab hold of a new sexy language that makes them feel like hacking all night, the way Perl did to programmers a decade+ ago. - Nathan
The reference to COBOL makes me cringe. Hopefully Perl will follow the path of sed and awk and fade away gradually with dignity. -- Dave W


I'm writing a lot of Perl code these days, but I'm doing so mostly for legacy reasons. And while Perl is a perfectly good language, I think that I'm far more likely to pick Python for new projects. I find Python to be nicer and I'm more productive with it than I am with Perl. --Tom
Python's great for corporate work: simple and extensible with SWIG. Hackers can pick up a python quickly and contribute, while performance bottlenecks can be replaced with C via SWIG.