[Catalyst] catalyst/perl and resources

[Nilson Santos Figueiredo Junior]

On 6/21/06, Tobias Kremer <t at funkreich.de> wrote:
> Which raises my all-time favourite question: Why is Perl still going strong
> in the US and UK whereas good-old Europe seems to has already abandoned it
> completely?

Not exactly Europe, but here in Brazil it also seems that almost
everyone abandoned Perl.
The main excuse is that Perl lacks maintainability and the eternal
"Perl is write-only" FUD spreading.

Despite that, there still are a lot of projects using Perl.
Bioinformatics projects around here are still 80-90% Perl territory
(but Python is steadily increasing its market share, mainly due to
some projects backed by "big names" such as IBM). A lot of old web
related companies also still use Perl. What saddens me a little bit is
that I've not heard of any *new* companies which use Perl around here.
It's somewhat seen as something of the past...

I could consider myself very lucky since I actually got a job where we
use Perl and Catalyst for some projects (namely: the ones I'm
involved). Sadly, the other Perl coders there doesn't seem to have a
good grasp of Perl (think huge not OO or even modular CGI scripts).
But I'm changing that little by little.

There are efforts in trying to spread Perl usage around here, usually
everyone is impressed with Perl's power at the talks the local Perl
Mongers give at open source events, but the main obstacle really is
that there's no big name backing Perl and it (sadly) doesn't have that
amazing past reputation. After all, if it's that good, why everyone is
using Java/.NET? Why IBM recommends PHP5 but not Perl? The list goes
on and you know that a lot of managers reason along this path. Also,
no one younger than 23-24 years old seems to know Perl anymore. The
rate of self-taught programmers here in Brazil is surprisingly low -
everyone seems to get their knowledge from the university and the
current academic trend is Java.

As I've said before, I don't really expect any of this to change with
Perl 6. People will never see Perl 6 as a different language because
it's still called Perl. It's a stupid reason but that's how people
really are.

A somewhat good side effect of this is that good Perl developers are
very well paid where they're needed and people usually recognize their
value since they're a somewhat scarce resource. But don't try to sell
your product stating that it uses "state-of-the-art" Perl technologies
or whatever. It will be bad marketing, unfortunately.

-Nilson Santos F. Jr.