Perl

What is the average salary for Perl programmers in 2020?

If I have no definitive answer on this, the Business Insider has some insights:

HackerRank polled 116000 developers about their salaries and got interesting results:

• Perl is associated with an average global salary of $84,025.50 (54.2% higher than the global average salary)
• Scala is associated with an average global salary of $77,159.60
• Go is associated with an average global salary of $72,691.30
• Python is associated with an average global salary of $56,670.90
• JavaScript is associated with an average global salary of $55,690

Without more information about the polled panel it’s hard to state this results as “Truth” but they seems to confirm personal beliefs:

Why Perl in 2020?

“Nobody use it. It’s a dead language. It’s a technology of the past…” Are the kind of statement you’ll be likely to hear about Perl nowadays.

Nonetheless, I’ve landed one of the most exciting mission I’ve ever had because of Perl. I’ve met great people, because of Perl. I’ve solved issues in no time, because of Perl.

So, there’s no chance I’ll drop Perl any time soon.

Originally published in July 2018 on my previous blog, and cross-posted on Medium.

Larry Wall once wrote “The three great virtue of the programmer are: laziness, impatience, and hubris”. I took great care to follow this path to become a programmer. Though I must admit I already had great disposition for laziness.

Now, as an accomplished programmer (cough hubris cough), I think it’s time to improve further. I’ve search for a loooooooong time. And after a week of thinking (cough impatience cough) I’ve decided to talk to you about the fourth virtue of the programmer.

Originally published in July 2016 on Hello.js, then on my previous blog.

As a Perl coder, I’m a big fan of functional programming.

If that sounds odd to you, think about all that features that are considered as idiomatic Perl:

• List processing (map, grep)
• High order functions (Mark Jason Dominus ;-) )
• Lazy evaluation (iterators)
• Lamda calculus (closure)

Functional programming is a fascinating thing but it’s not so easy to use consistently. We all love the concept, feel the inner power. We all use lists, closure, functions as parameter, but how many of us manage to fully apply functional programming everywhere and commit to pure functions and immutability?

This time I feel really qualified to write this article because believe me, I love Perl ! I think in Perl, I dream in Perl, and I really appreciate the whole Perl community. I’ve been in love with this language for more than a decade but I decided that I needed a change.

I’ve already said in a previous article why I chose to learn JavaScript this year (instead of getting involved in Perl 6 for example) but let me tell you why you might also enjoy learning JavaScript if you love Perl. Perl developers form a very unified community that all too often, resist outside influences, but learning a second language like JavaScript can really be a very enlightening experience.

Originally published in June 2011 on my previous blog. Fifteen years later the language has changed, the problem has not.

If one thing starts to bother me in the Perl universe, it’s all the dependencies which force you to pull half of the CPAN each time you try to install a major module.

Don’t get me wrong: I love Perl, I love CPAN, I love modules and I definitively love code reuse BUT may be we start doing it the wrong way.

Originally published in June 2010 on my previous blog, in both English and French. The Iron Man challenge is long over, but the diagnosis about a community’s duty to market its own language has aged well.

I came across a comic that illustrates well, to my mind, the issue with Perl’s popularity: XKCD: The secret of the Universe

Wherever the place I’ve worked, Perl was present to one degree or another, often in a crucial place, without its use being advertised or even known. I’ve long believed, that it was the reason why Perl wasn’t as popular as it could be, despite its use.