[colinstrickland]

I spent a year or so trying to help a company I was working with hire experienced perl developers to work on existing code. Pretty much all of the candidates were way below the standard required.

I came to the conclusion that this was probably a question of maturity. I think experienced perl developers are now an enclave of older programmers who've stuck with it and are now entrenched experts. They're all too expensive.

There seems to be a generation gap, presumably where everyone ran off and learnt ruby or python, as perl 5 was perceived to be stagnant, for whatever reason.

I think what remained in the available salary bracket was either people who weren't very good, or were too new for it to show either way. Anecdotal, of course, but it reminded me of other job markets I've seen entering the first phase of an eventually near terminal decline.