From: Mike Bourdon > The hidden message here is “the more available senior developers, the more > likely available > jobs”, an expanding talent pool will lead to an expanding job market.
I fully agree. What happends in the regions where there are extremely few perl programmers, no matter if they are good or bad... we can imagine. What can we do in order to promote perl in those countries/regions? There are almost no translated books for learning perl in my country, and the editors are not very interested in printing perl books because they won't sell well enough, and those few which would be interested would probably pirate them. Without books and without funds for promoting perl for beeing taught in schools, perl won't have any chance in face of DotNet or Java. > In my humble opinion the perl community needs to embrace the concept of self > propagation. For > the most part perl/oo perl/mod_perl developers are self taught. Junior or mid > level talent (a > majority of the talent pool) is passed over as not enough experience. Perhaps > this is because > they do not push themselves or the roles they come from are User Interface or > system ops, > people that did not make it in those roles. This where as an investment of > time and effort can > go a long way into building the pool of perl/oo > perl/mod_perl developers. Too often everyone is > looking for the instant > gratification of a senior level skill set. True, but how to do this practicly? I tried to convince some programmers that Perl is better than PHP, but without any success. Can perl programs run on share hosting web sites? There are some such hosting companies that don't even offer perl support, and those who offer it, offer just the standard Perl distribution, which don't offer a web framework, or templating systems, or ORMS, or form processors, and in these conditions I can't tell that perl is so great. Can they hide the source code? (Because who knows who can get it from those free hosting web sites) I found that they can hide it, but only after installing Open SSL and a perl module, which they can't do, because those sites don't offer root access and neither shell access. In order to show them how good is perl, I told them that they would need to have a dedicated server, or a VPS, but the cheapest VPS costs much more than a shared hosting solution, so in this case perl has another disadvantage. They've also told me that they know that perl is harder to learn than PHP. What can I tell them? That it is not true? Of course that I could have told them that for real good big projects, perl is easier to use than PHP, but most of the PHP users don't care about that kind of projects. They care about simple projects created from scratch, that don't even use a web framework or an ORM or a form processor. But finally those poor PHP programmers find more jobs than a perl programmer. Octavian
