[c250d07]

Good article with some good points. But it did get me thinking, is Perl getting ready to be in a prime position to become the next Cobol? Probability will go up considerably if Perl 6 never comes out to shake up the ecosystem, but even if it does come, what's to say that there won't be Perl 5 applications running into the next century?

Combine its shorthand and with the fact that it's already getting hard to find Perl people, and we could see some dedicated Perl warriors doing very, very well in the coming years.

[adrianhoward]

To some extent it's already true. There's a lot of Perl in the financial sector. That community is paying a lot more than the average for Perl dev's already :-)

[gouranga]

We in the finance sector killed it years ago. We're now trying to kill java and move to python.

[adrianhoward]

Well - since you've still not managed to kill COBOL I'd bet on there still being a lot of Perl in ten years time :-)

[gouranga]

We killed that as well!

[adrianhoward]

Considering the number of folk dealing with COBOL systems I bumped into at GOTO Copenhagen last week, and the number of COBOL jobs that pop up after a quick google I would beg to differ.

I can, of course, understand why you would really want it to be dead ;-)

[gouranga]

I'm quite surprised actually! I've not seen COBOL in the finance sector (at least in the UK) for about 5-6 years.

Perhaps there still are a few corners where there are some rotting corpses hacking away on AS/400s which are actually gluing everything together!

I remember getting to sledgehammer the crap out of our AS/400 platforms and incinerate two entire pallets of IBM manuals - was "a great day for freedom" to paraphrase Pink Floyd.