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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

I moved from Perl to python around 6 years ago. There are more jobs available for Python, though probably more competition as well.

I regularly see Perl jobs posted in London, but the wages are surprisingly poor, compared to what I could get for my Django knowledge.

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I think your comment on wages is astute, and it's the same everywhere. There are Perl jobs around, but they're on legacy codebases in (parts of) organizations that are basically too dysfunctional / under-resourced / incompetent to upgrade them, and if you take the job you'll just be putting out fires and stagnating.

When you take that into account, the salary would need to be at a real premium to make it worthwhile, and the premium just isn't there.

The 2017 SO Developer Survey has Perl in 6th place for highest compensation in the world. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-to... Interestingly, Perl places 5th in the USA for highest compensation, and it doesn't even make the lists of France, Germany, India, and the UK.

Hmm, I am pretty surprised by that, but I'll take it at face value.

I suspect there is too much else going on for a comparison of salaries by language to be meaningful. Those Perl programmers are probably highly paid mainly because they have 20ish years of experience, and lots of other valuable Linux/Unix experience. There are probably lots of fresh graduate and entry level JavaScript / Java / C++ developers bringing down those averages.

I always get a good laugh when I see job ads for a "Junior Perl developer" paying 25k GBP or something. They stopped making those 20 years ago.

I learned Perl back in the Perl 4 days, and still write one-off scripts in it. Lately, though, I do most new work in Python, since the young seem more likely to know that than to know Perl.

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