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I worked in IT at a financial services provider as a WAN technician in the 90s. That was my last IT job. Then I worked mostly in operations at a couple teleco
by VLM 10y ago
I worked in IT at a financial services provider as a WAN technician in the 90s. That was my last IT job.
Then I worked mostly in operations at a couple telecom companies. I mostly automated and integrated a lot of stuff, at that time Perl was contemporary and not looked down upon by the cool kids like today. Programming is different when done in a revenue generating department rather than an expense only department so times were better.
Somehow I eventually ended up in engineering writing tool integration and automation stuff mostly for telecom company end users (like telecom techs not end users at home). This is somewhat weird in that engineering is usually not revenue generating but it kind of is here so its kind of in between.
Where I work now IT is infrastructural and replace mice and image PCs and pull cable and fix printers and so forth. There are a tiny handful of interesting sysadmin and router operator jobs but mostly going back to IT would mean imaging PCs. The fun programming is done in engineering by engineering on the production (and test and dev) networks. Under those conditions I have little interest in going back to IT and being paid solely on bean counting metrics like trouble tickets cleared per day and PC hardware replacement average outage time and so forth.
- vgy7ujm 10y agoPerl is still cool. Lots of new improvements happening. Perl 5 has yearly releases in case you did not know. Sounds like you could do well in devops if you still have your Perl and automation skills.
- vgy7ujm 10y agoHey, downvoter: Perl is cooler than you.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- gtirloni 10y agoI didn't downvote you but I see zero people using Perl in DevOps and no job posting I've seen lately asks for it. I've worked with Perl in the past and it's as capable as any programming language out there, but the ecosystem isn't there anymore. At least not for DevOps.
- vgy7ujm 10y agoI use it. And bash more often than any of Python or Ruby. I use Go tools more often than tools written in Python or Ruby these days. Demand for something in job ads does no always equal what is used out there. My current job was not announced as a Perl job. The HR department had listed Python though. We use zero Python in our product or tools.. There was already some Perl here. Actually when looking past the makefiles I discovered that the build system was 90% Perl. Let's just say they got lucky with the hire since no one had a clue when they were recruiting. I think this is the situation in lots of places and if you know your devops and prefer Perl you will do as good as or better than anyone using those other languages that "surely must be dying now that we have Go.."
- muraiki 10y agoI have an anecdote to add. I worked for a web hosting company that has around 20 years or more worth of Perl code doing all aspects of devops and also for building numerous services along with web applications. I spent a lot of time learning Perl, using it for both maintenance programming and greenfield development. I also made an effort to interact with the greater Perl community and to keep up with new technologies they've created (such as Mojolicious and Dancer). I've used both old school barebones Perl OO and "Modern Perl" with Moo and Moose. I think that Steven Little summed Perl's situation up correctly in his talk, "Perl is not dead, it is a dead end"[0]. I strongly feel that Perl became a competitive disadvantage for us. New systems that we wanted to use, such as Openstack or Kubernetes, are not being written in Perl. SDKs for services that we want to interact with do not exist for Perl. Simply dealing with the distinction between numbers and strings in JSON was a constant source of pain. Everything we wanted to use we had to make ourselves, which is a huge amount of work. We simply couldn't leverage the open source community's efforts on languages that are much more popular. This is not to ignore the success of the company, which was only possible because of Perl. But in 2017, if you really want to use Perl as the basis for your tech stack or even just in any sort of tooling, you had better expect to write everything on your own. Meanwhile, your competitors can leverage the vastly more active communities of Python, Javascript, Go... heck, even C# nowadays. CPAN was once tremendous, but it really doesn't compare anymore. [0] https://speakerdeck.com/stevan_little/perl-is-not-dead-it-is-a-dead-end https://speakerdeck.com/stevan_little/perl-is-not-dead-it-is...