The state of Perl

Some other monks made comments about the quietness on this site... here are some visual clues and trends:

As measured by github changes and stackoverflow tags....

And also:

If you add C++ to the latter, you will see nobody is looking for C++ jobs (but they search for C instead).

Comment on The state of Perl

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Re: The state of Perl by mr_mischief (Monsignor) on Dec 05, 2016 at 20:15 UTC
The chart I'm seeing says Perl is the top 20 or so most popular language on GitHub with about 146 million lines changed "recently". I'm not sure that's the biggest disaster considering Perl had its own distribution and deployment network years before GithHub existed. Sure, it'd be nice to see it closer to where Python or PHP are. Yet people make a handsome living with Clojure, R, Erlang, COBOL, and others that are well below Perl on that chart. As for the job seeker chart, although the absolute share of job postings is low for Perl (although it seems to be recovering from a trough there at the end) the number of jobs per seeker is quite high. That's a good thing if you're a skilled job seeker. It's also probably why some of the listings don't mention it. They'd rather recruit skills they can fill more easily. Get more people to look at that 4 jobs per seeker chart and the market will even out a bit. C++ is a great pun of a language name. It's a nightmare for search engine users. C isn't much better. Notice the tendency to use "golang", "Rlang", etc. with some of these names. Unsearchable names are a real problem.	[reply]
Re^2: The state of Perl by Jenda (Abbot) on Dec 21, 2016 at 14:59 UTC
"Unsearchable names are a real problem." Like Perl, space, 6, for example. Jenda Enoch was right! Enjoy the last years of Rome.	[reply]
Re^3: The state of Perl by mr_mischief (Monsignor) on Jan 06, 2017 at 19:38 UTC
Indeed, that's a wonderful example. It hurts Perl6 and Perl5 both that extra hoop jumping is required to find information about either one exclusive of the other. That's probably the strongest argument I can can think of for not naming two different but related languages as if they are mere version differences. I'm not one of the anti-6 folks. I like both of them. I just wish it the naming wasn't so confusing for the search engines. Using quotes helps in SEs that understand them, though. "Perl" is still unique enough that "Perl 6" gives decent results. Searching for "Perl 5" becomes problematic though if you're looking for stuff written before the " 5" was necessary for differentiation. It's still not as bad as searching for some of these others, but it could be better.	[reply]
Re^4: The state of Perl by 5haun (Scribe) on Nov 01, 2017 at 15:33 UTC
Re: The state of Perl by soonix (Canon) on Dec 01, 2016 at 08:32 UTC
The declining number of Job offers might be due to the fact that with Perl you get more things done than with other languages (now is there a half-tongue-in-cheek smiley?)	[reply]

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