Chad Perrin wrote:
> Amazon's hiring seems to focus more on Perl than any other single
> language, actually -- and has for a long time.  As such, while the amount
> of dynamic language usage may actually be increasing, I think one might
> better represent the situation by saying that Amazon has used dynamic
> languages to a significant degree for a long time.
> 
> That's "long time" in Intarweb years, of course.

Two tidbits about Amazon:

1. I don't remember how I stumbled across it, but somewhere in the great 
electronic beyond there is a blog posting by someone who describes the 
hiring process at Amazon. One of the things they look for is someone who 
can bang out a quick solution to massive text crunching problems using 
regular expressions, either in Perl or more primitive command line 
tools. I don't recall whether Python or Ruby were "acceptable".

2. A year or so ago there was an ACM conference on functional languages 
here in Portland. I didn't go to the conference itself, but I did attend 
a Saturday Erlang workshop and a Sunday Scheme workshop. At the Erlang 
workshop, the small (30 or so) room at Portland State University was 
packed to overflowing -- at least 60 jammed into it -- and at least a 
dozen of them were from a couple of teams at Amazon, who were hiring.