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Comment by sjclemmy | Hacker News Reader

That reminds me of a colleague complaining about a recent cohort of about 60 webdev graduates. Not a single one wanted to learn perl, but were quite happy to get stuck into anything Javascript preferably react!

EDIT: why the downvotes?

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They're quite rationally looking for assignments that increase their own market value.

learning backwards can be good too.... i know a guy making $200k+ managing some old AS400s, part time, and he is too young to have grown up working on them. old school skills are worth money, and the unwillingness of new entrants to learn them just makes them that much more valuable.

I haven't done anything in Perl since 2005 or so. I think it got eaten pretty much by Python, PHP and Ruby.

I've worked in enough Perl at one point to actually like it but I would never recommend anyone learn it unless they absolute have to. At this point it's effectively a dead ended language. It's also a terribly difficult language to learn.

I don't particularly like the Javascriptification of every technology but these webdev graduates have the right idea.

i didn't find perl terribly difficult to learn at all, but then again i learned it 12-15 years ago and maybe it was more on par with other languages at that time. don't think i would want to learn it now though, still have a strong appreciation for it though.

Perl is full of strange grammatical rules and even stranger conventions that it's one of the few languages I learned 15 years ago that I can't just pick up and use. I've forgotten basically everything I ever knew about it and yet other languages from the time period, even some odd ones, I can still grasp enough to restart the process.

If I was studying web development in 2016 with the hops of getting a good job, I'd also stay away form Perl and learn JavaScript.

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