Re^2: How to wake up the Perl community?

[sundialsvc4]

COBOL?   Not so fast.   Do you know how many millions of lines of COBOL are in-service right now ... doing exactly what they were built to do, millions of times an hour, on big-iron machines that are specifically engineered to (among other things) support them?   Or how much what-they-do is worth?

Programming languages don’t “die.”   Nor do they particularly require “proselytes.”

[rnewsham]

Yes I am well aware of cobol usage which was exactly my point. Cobol is still in use, in other words it has not died. However their are serious problems with finding new developers willing to learn it as older developers retire. This is a situation which I see could occur in perl without a constant influx of new young talent.

[DrHyde]

That's great news for COBOL programmers, as they can charge $BIGNUM. To play devil's advocate, people who are good at perl should *encourage* it to become an unkillable niche language, a rare skill, so that we can bathe in money.