use Perl

Tired of "Perl is dead" FUD ?

Journal written by renodino (6856) and posted by brian_d_foy on 2007.09.13 19:46   

Yeah, me too. But I'm a capitalist, so I like to see what people are writing checks for. As I'm fed up with the various unsubstantiated claims, I've whipped up a little graphic of job posts on Dice that will hopefully cheer you up. I'll try to keep it updated regularly. If nothing else, it'll give us all something to watch as we're overtaken by our Ruby and Python overlords.

Related Stories

2007 jobs.perl.org report 11 comments [+]

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Year | Total | Jan  Feb  Mar  Apr  May  Jun  Jul  Aug  Sep   Oct   Nov   Dec
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2001 |   280 |   0    2    8   21   40   34   33   29   34    30    35    14
2002 |   413 |  34   33   35   16   45   26   37   46   33    42    31    35
2003 |   560 |  43   36   56   56   21   39   44   64   53    52    52    44
2004 |   949 |  75   58   78   88   74   88   82   87   65    87    85    82
2005 |  1429 |  93  110  120  135  135  125  115  113  106   132   144   101
2006 |  1857 | 164  138  157  151  166  153  140  176  152   172   179   109
2007 |  1966 | 182  156  181  190  177  168  176  165  145   179   148    99
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I'm not affiliated with jobs.perl.org, and this is only the simplest of analyses. I didn't try to correct for duplicate posts where the same job was re-advertised. jobs.perl.org has their own stats, although Dave Rolsky seemed to think my numbers might be better. I don't know if I believe him. :)

I don't attempt to draw any conclusions about the popularity (up or down) of Perl from these numbers. In general, I think that the continual uptrend is more about people finding out about the free service than the same market having more jobs.

I made this same report in 2006 too, and there are some interesting links in the comments. Also interesting is renodino's graphs about jobs on Dice and the code he wrote to make them, along with the discussion about the usefulness of any conclusions.

2007's Top Ten Stories on use.Perl 2 comments [+]

Here are the top ten most read stories from 2007 on use.Perl:

• XML::Tiny (January 29, drhyde)
• Video and Audio recordings from YAPC::Asia 2007 (April 24, miyagawa)
• Jonathon Rockway throws down the gauntlet on Object::Tiny (September 4, Alias)
• Tired of "Perl is dead" FUD ? (September 14, renodino)
• Perl 6 Design Team Minutes for 07 February 2007 (February 16, chromatic)
• Faces + CPAN == A More Polite Community (September 9, schwern)
• Are we framing"dual-life" modules the wrong way? (September 26, Alias)
• Idea! CPAN Version Advisories (September 17, schwern)
• search.cpan.org Gravatars are go! (September 11, schwern)
• Perl 6 Design Minutes for 09 May 2007 (May 14, chromatic)

Although the numbers aren't that important (so I don't include them), they do roughly follow Zipf's law, and they aren't ranked by date—September seemed to be a good time to write interesting stuff, but also the time that we started posting more stuff to the front page. These are only stories, not journals.

• Why is Perl's bar so tall? (Score:2)

  by brian_d_foy (44)

  I would tend to think that's right, but it's counter to what a lot of other people report. Is it just the way different people count?
  
  It would be really cool to see a Venn diagram sorta thing to see how they all overlap, but I guess that would be too many
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Alias (5735)

    I'd say the reason Perl is to tall is because so many jobs have "this, that, the other.... and Perl".
    
    That's part of the reason jobs.perl.org became so popular, because on jobs.perl.org you know the jobs are PRIMARILY about Perl, not just incidentally invol
    • Re: (Score:2)

      by brian_d_foy (44)

      I think that's probably true, and maybe it's just been buried in all the jobs that listed Java in the same way.
      
      That's the tricky thing about this sort of analysis: what are you going to actualyl be doing when you get the job? There might be a Perl keyword
      • Re: (Score:1)

        by cwilbur (3121)

        When I was recently looking for a new job, about one in three positions I considered wanted Perl programmers because they had a massive legacy system written in Perl that they wanted to port to Java. Before I put any faith in this graph, I'd want to know
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by renodino (6856)

    Any chance of sharing the code?

    I've posted it to perlmonks [perlmonks.com].

    Its pretty simplistic, so I don't think its TPR-worthy.

    Many will question the "sampling" technique, but I'm assuming the spurious datapoints are as likely in PHP/Python/Ruby samples as Per
• And jobs.perl keeps growing... (Score:1)

  by Alias (5735)

  http://jobs.perl.org/about/stats [perl.org]
• Per city (Score:1)

  by jonswar (7880)

  And just for fun, here's the # results per city for the top twenty cities:
  
    757 New York, NY
    211 San Francisco, CA
    191 Chicago, IL
    156 San Jose, CA
    151 Jersey City, NJ
    120 San Diego, CA
    93 Seattle, WA
• Not growing in my town (Score:1)

  by jbooe (8154)

  I live in a fairly large metropolitan area in the Midwest (US). Here, as far as advertised jobs, PHP is king, as well as the usual Java/.NET. Most jobs I see listing Perl have it in a generic list of requirements or for shops that need Perl programmers to
• Perl isn't dead, it's merely sleeping (Score:2)

  by djberg96 (2603)

  Cobol returned 1287 hits, more than some of the other languages you showed there. Does that mean Cobol is "alive"? I wouldn't say so. Not in any "community enthusiasm" or "upcoming features" sort of way.

  And, as others have pointed out, Perl is usually an
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by chromatic (983)

    I think it's safe to say (in that anecdotal sort of way that chromatic hates) that the enthusiasm for it is in decline.

    That depends on your definition of "safe". If you mean "here is a stack of statistics and here is the research methods and raw data"
  • • Re: (Score:2)

      by djberg96 (2603)

      Oh, I'm well aware that COBOL will probably be around long after I'm retired. But then, I'm talking about community vitality. There's really nothing to look forward to with COBOL beyond a paycheck. They still teach COBOL in the US Military, btw.

      Regarding
      • • Re: (Score:2)

          by djberg96 (2603)

          Hah, fair enough. I'm not sure how you count the total number of Perl devs who contribute to Perl libraries but aren't listed. It's probably impossible without manually checking README and/or CHANGES files.

          I've been doing some more number crunching for b