[guitarbill]

> continue to demand Perl skills in their developers while Booking.com is investing in Perl as its core development language. How can this be explained?

It's simple: because rewriting it doesn't make business sense. But from having talked to Booking.com devs, I don't get the impression it's something they'd recommend for new projects.

So while some businesses build on Perl might be "growing", is this because of Perl, despite Perl, or doesn't matter? The success of a business says nothing about the ecosystem surrounding the language they are using (unless they get so big they can shape it). A far better proxy for language health is how easy it is to hire a team of competent <language> programmers at all skill levels - by which I mean veterans with enough varied experience, and college graduates who'll consider programming in <language> without a bigger paycheck. (The ultimate metric would factor in turn over due to dissatisfaction/burn out from tech debt.)

For what it's worth, I still love `perl` for one-liners, because it's far more consistent than the various GNU and BSD versions of `sed`/`awk`/`grep`. But I'd rather be programming something else, and I'd rather be deploying something else, given that consistent deployments are possible now with language-agnostic tools like docker. So a big advantage Perl had is gone.

[labster]

Yeah, I felt like there must have been a culture shift at Booking recently, because I spent the whole time at TPC::EU Glasgow last year without hearing a single pitch for hiring from Booking. Given that "Booking is hiring" been something of a running gag, something must be up.

It's not all that hard to hire competent and experienced Perl devs if you're willing to hire over the age of thirty, and remote (i.e. not moving to Amsterdam).

I would mostly recommend Perl 6 over Perl 5 for new projects, though. At least for those intended to last more than 5 years (which de facto means 20 years). I know the module ecosystem is not quite there yet, but the concurrency support is far more advanced than anything planned for Perl 5.

[leejo]

> Yeah, I felt like there must have been a culture shift at Booking recently, because I spent the whole time at TPC::EU Glasgow last year without hearing a single pitch for hiring from Booking. Given that "Booking is hiring" been something of a running gag, something must be up.

Booking have changed their policy w/r/t sponsoring conferences and/or the "we're hiring" thing in the last 12 months. I know this as I'm one of the Swiss Perl Workshop organisers and they've sponsored us for the last few years, last year we couldn't get anything out of them and when we enquired we found out the reasons. I'll approach them again this year to see if the policy has changed again.

I don't know the exact reasons for this, and I suspect it's not a Perl thing but rather a change in management policy and/or the realisation that throwing devs at their systems is not the solution. Maybe someone read Brooks? I interviewed there several years ago and it seemed utterly bonkers that their dev team was > 100 given the nature of the business.

Anyway, to tie in with the grandparent post - we know that many banks in Switzerland are using Perl but they will absolutely not talk about it, nor sponsor us, nor send employees to the workshops. We know this as we have had private attendees who work for those banks tell us these things.

Perl was everywhere at one point, and by extrapolation that means it's still in an awful lot of places.

> It's not all that hard to hire competent and experienced Perl devs if you're willing to hire over the age of thirty, and remote (i.e. not moving to Amsterdam).

We're looking at the junior route, we've taken on 4 in the last 18 months and intend to continue this. We're at a point where new graduates were born after the Perl peak, so they don't have any knowledge of its decline in usage and/or preconceptions about the language.