>
> At this point, most language debates come down to opinion and
> assumption.  I don't believe that Perl is an old language that's going
> to fade away, while ruby becomes more popular.  But, that's just my own
> view/opinion.  I wasn't saying it because it's more mature and has some
> existing modules that maybe don't exist for Ruby or anything.  I might
> be wrong about how in demand Perl will or will not be, just like my
> opinion abut ruby and other languages.  Neither opinion will make it
> more or less likely, so we'll all have to see.  Just remember, there
> are plenty of new jobs in Perl, too (not just older code people are
> hired to maintain).
> --

 There will be work in perl for many years no doubt, before I found
out about ruby I had many perl books and was up in the air if I'd
rather look for work in Java or Perl, but I would characterize perl
this way:


 There's programmers who like to believe ruby is just hype and some
sort of cult and don't want to spend the time to learn something new
or even just find out about it, they have a strong attachment to what
they already know.

  There are many people who have no interest in learning anything new
if they have to spend their own time and money studying it. They will
only learn new things if the company tells them to or sends them to a
class, or maybe if they are desperate and need to find a job.

  Managers who see training people in new things or asking them to
learn new things as something of a problem .. They want to hire people
who have all the skills they need and try to stick with whatever skill
sets their workers already have. People trying to advocate new
technology may be ostracized. I worked with a number of people who
refused to learn perl and wanted to do everything with shell scripts,
and they wrote giant unwieldy ugly shell scripts that where totally
laughable, and yet management accepted their lame explanations of why
it would take them several weeks to get some project to work
correctly. I could not say anything to the contrary as it was all
political and I would have gotten in trouble.

 Then there are sysadmins who write an occasional perl script and have
no real incentive to go beyond that, that may be fairly understandable
as long as they don't have to develop alot of large apps.

 So there maybe alot of legacy perl code out there, and all of the
people mentioned above are not really programmers who have their heart
in programming enough to want to use the best technology and try to
excel towards excellence in development based on object oriented
programming and paradign that's validity can't be denied, though they
will try to anyway.

 Sometimes you are stuck on a machine that the admins won't let you
install what you want to use, but other than that I would never want
to work at a company that wanted to develop some new app in perl.

 If the economy was to be so bad that you had to learn old technology
to get a job, that would seem sad, though the IT industry has all
kinds of ups and downs. One year you might hear college students are
shying away from CS because of the poor IT sector, a few years later
they'll say IT jobs are the future ..