Other interesting thing is that the jaw-dropping chart shown in the “crashing the enterprise party.” article shows growth of given language job ads, not absolute number. See absolute number for opening your eyes

See, that absolute numbers show that Perl is higher than PHP and Python, although PHP and Pyhon are rising, while Perl is on one level.

One more thing – Savio compared PHP and other langs + PHP combbniations (see here). What if we add Perl? See. Wow.

See also:

1. Perl as good as java, python and PHP way above
2. Perl job = high salary
3. Nice people I met at YAPC::EU – continued

Perl as good as java, python and PHP are way above

There are a few articles about growing popularity of open source and languages like PHP and Python in corporate world. See cnet, o’rly and gazeta (in Polish).

Until now, java and .NET seemed to be the most popular in corporate world. Now is time for Python, PHP, Perl, and open source solutions. For example Farmville, very popular online game, with million of users, is said to run on LAMP stack.

There is also opinion that companies like Zend or ActiveState give “corporate face” to open source. And yes, open source is not free (as free beer) – you often have to (or are willing to) pay for support, knowledge, contractors etc. (vide MySQL Enterprise).

But, returning to the title of this post – on the graph in cnet article- you can see that there is the same amout of job offers for java and perl developers, some more for .NET, much much more and rising for PHP and even more (and rising more) for python.

See also:

1. Perl, PHP, corporate – continued.
2. Perl – why not popular
3. Perl is dead – or is it not?

Nice:

• bug-fixes, optimisations, tuning. Runs faster.
• autodie pragma

Strange:

• “..” operator is interpretedin boolean context when used inside a when statement – yet another WTF. So, the behaviour of “..” is not less consistent. On the other hand it may be usefull.
• Change of smart match behavior in comaprison to 5.10
1. better encapsulation
2. ordering matters – $key ~~ %hash is OK, while %hash ~~ $key is not.
3. distributive – applies itself recursively across data structures.  Isn’t it getting too smart? And too complex to understand in real code? And too WTFish? I’ll quote the fragment of perl tips newsletter from http://perltraining.com.au/
   

   following expression is *true* when evaluated under 5.10.1, but *false*
   under 5.10.0:

   ‘bar’ ~~ [ 'foo', [ 'bar', 'baz' ], ‘qux’ ]

   In the same vein, given the following code:

   [ 'foo', 'bar', 'baz' ] ~~ \&subroutine

   Perl 5.10.1 will call the subroutine *three* times (once for each
   element), and the whole expression will be considered true if *all* the
   results are true. On the other hand, Perl 5.10.0 would call the
   subroutine only once, passing in the whole data structure.

See also:

1. More on foreach localisation
2. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP) – part 2 – Encode
3. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP)

Then, my wife asked me another question – ok, if it is so great, why do so few people and companies write in it?

This was question I couldn’t find answer for. I told her about that is not so easy to make .exe file from perl script, but as I heard strawberry perl is good in doing it. Or PAR. I’ll have to look closely at them both in near future. Anyway, in C/C++ it is the most natural way to run the program – to make executable of it In Perl it is not the natural way. And some companies prefer to have executable files, for example to sell them

Anyway, that is good question: Why Perl is not so popular as C-something, or java?

See also:

1. Perl is dead – or is it not?
2. Perl as good as java, python and PHP way above
3. installing from CPAN without root

To install this,  head to http://adserver.szabgab.com/

Gabor is also a developer of padre – perl IDE.

Thanks Gabor!

See also:

1. Perl ads here
2. Nice people I met at YAPC::EU – continued
3. installing from CPAN without root

And, more important for myself – what should I do?

There are several things:

• spread the word that perl is great and not dead, by for example joining ironman blogging chalenge
• wait, and do nothing – if perl is good then it may defend itself without my help
• learn a new language, to be safe. Or brush up old good java or C-something.

What do YOU think about it?

See also:

1. Perl – why not popular
2. Working as perl developer – telecommuting
3. WTFish side of using Perl talk at YAPC::EU 2009 – slides