10 ms·

You are sort of ignoring the bias in your own AI extremist prediction. People who have decided to go all in in learning an interpreted language like Perl or ev

by ak_111 4y ago

You are sort of ignoring the bias in your own AI extremist prediction. People who have decided to go all in in learning an interpreted language like Perl or even PHP, had to continuously also learn react, js, ruby,... and gazillions of other languages and frameworks to remain in business over the last two decades. While people who invested in learning C, Java or SQL have as much healthy opportunities to pursue today with almost the same amount of knowledge that they had accumulated three decades ago. Their life has been much less stressful, pretty much on auto-pilot, while those who were pursuing the latest technology are constantly living on the edge having to continuously relearn entire new framework on average every 3-5 years to remain relevant. So yes all these glitzy languages have "won" but it wasn't by these "ancient" languages losing. If I had to bet I would say a decade from now, based on the last 50 years history of computing, I can easily imagine the same amount of jobs for C programmers as we have today but there will be as many Ruby jobs as we have perl jobs today.

postexitus 4y ago
There are no perl jobs.
- ak_111 4y ago
  Exactly my point. You had proportionally as many perl jobs in the late 90s as you have Ruby jobs today. It even had early mover advantage in the scripting space and insanely good ecosystem of libraries.
- weinzierl 4y ago
  I almost took one a little more than a year ago, and I wasn't even looking for one...
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  There are a considerable number of Perl jobs out there - just not many "greenfield" perl jobs. Most of them are maintaining existing codebases (not a fun job), and some are "help port this legacy codebase to not perl". I'd not discount Perl. Its incredibly fast to develop services in, stable as fuck, runs anywhere, performant (relatively), flexible, and if you were a startup looking to get a product out the door, just offer decent TC to a couple of old hands you can ship something viable fast.
  - CuriouslyC 4y ago
    Perl is a great tool for when you want to scale that text mangling file wrangling bash script to do more stuff, and pretty much in no other case.
    - nibbleshifter 4y ago
      A horrifying amount of applications out there that I've seen are basically just that - wrassling some text around, but with a billion layers of unnecessary abstraction. I get to see a lot of peoples code in my job. Most of it is ridiculous levels of over engineering
- wankle 4y ago
  Dice lists 10 times more Perl jobs than Rust jobs and almost 3 times more than Kotlin.
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
You don't need to kill a chasing bear to survive, you just need to run faster than your friend.
- ak_111 4y ago
  With those new interpreted language that are easy to pick and have a low-barrier of entry you are constantly having to run faster than an influx of fresh energetic high school dropouts and boot camp graduates. With less fashionable language that require significant expertise and experience in picking them up like C (understanding the hardware level) and Java (understanding the JVM and OOP concepts) the barriers of entry are much higher and this will mean you have to outrun fewer people in the long run to survive.
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    "Java (understanding the JVM and OOP concepts)" I am pretty sure that you can programm java without knowing details about the JVM and I would think, that most java programmers do exactly this. I think only in high performance scenarios knowing more is beneficial? But I have not touched java in a long time .. as I have indeed choosen the web as plattform. But I don't feel threatened by the high school kids coming from boot camps. Edit: I know what a pointer is, so I can work closely with wasm libaries. I know algorithms and how to structure data and why I am structuring data this way in this case, so I can adopt in another case. I know how to achieve performant simple code. I know how to debug layers of code with sideeffects over sideeffects. Raceconditions, memory leaks, etc. (All a thing in js, too). Using and understanding the profiler etc. Someone coming from a coding bootcamp, does not know this. He or she might learn it after years of practice, which is allright by me - but they are no direct threat to me, despite that I don't even really know react for example.
    - seniorivn 4y ago
      not feeling threatened doesn't mean you're not under threat. It's entirely possible that between your skill level and those boot campers is a few(dozen) percents of workforce. But at the same time it's entirely possible that if you are not as quickly progressing as the growth of the industry, you could become a part of the same percentile as bootcampers in no time.
throwthrowuknow 4y ago
Reskilling has its upsides, you are exposed to many more paradigms and communities that do things completely differently which allows for a lot of cross pollination. living life on autopilot isn’t usually a source of great insights.
- ak_111 4y ago
  Reskilling is much more productive and fun when you are doing it for the intellectual journey and insight, rather than because you need to do it to find a job. Indeed being able to auto-pilot your job allows you an amazing amount of time and freedom to learn new things deeply. See also the detrimental effects of "publish or perish" mindset in academia.
weatherlite 4y ago
I find it hard to believe people who learned Java don't have to learn new things every now and then. Yeah maybe they stuck to Java but the whole backend ecosystem looks way different than even 10 years ago. Even C is debatable.
- ak_111 4y ago
  Of course, everyone is always learning, you can't remain static. But you could afford to become more and more of a specialist in Java and growing your job opportunities that you can apply to. If you became more and more of a specialist in Perl on the other hand you would have had to completely relearn something new by now to find as many opportunities as you used to in the late 90s.
  - weatherlite 4y ago
    I don't think it made a huge difference in most of these guys careers. I'm sure Perl "specialists" were able to move stacks if they wanted to...and you learn most of it on the job anyway so its not like you had to take a year off to catch up learning Java. So yeah it was a time investment for people but I don't think its as dramatic as you're making it seem. I'm saying this based on the fact the job market was amazing for software developers in the last decade or more. Things now might be different.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by ak_111 4y ago

postexitus 4y ago

There are no perl jobs.

ak_111 4y ago
Exactly my point. You had proportionally as many perl jobs in the late 90s as you have Ruby jobs today. It even had early mover advantage in the scripting space and insanely good ecosystem of libraries.
weinzierl 4y ago
I almost took one a little more than a year ago, and I wasn't even looking for one...
nibbleshifter 4y ago
There are a considerable number of Perl jobs out there - just not many "greenfield" perl jobs. Most of them are maintaining existing codebases (not a fun job), and some are "help port this legacy codebase to not perl". I'd not discount Perl. Its incredibly fast to develop services in, stable as fuck, runs anywhere, performant (relatively), flexible, and if you were a startup looking to get a product out the door, just offer decent TC to a couple of old hands you can ship something viable fast.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  Perl is a great tool for when you want to scale that text mangling file wrangling bash script to do more stuff, and pretty much in no other case.
  - nibbleshifter 4y ago
    A horrifying amount of applications out there that I've seen are basically just that - wrassling some text around, but with a billion layers of unnecessary abstraction. I get to see a lot of peoples code in my job. Most of it is ridiculous levels of over engineering
wankle 4y ago
Dice lists 10 times more Perl jobs than Rust jobs and almost 3 times more than Kotlin.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

You don't need to kill a chasing bear to survive, you just need to run faster than your friend.

ak_111 4y ago
With those new interpreted language that are easy to pick and have a low-barrier of entry you are constantly having to run faster than an influx of fresh energetic high school dropouts and boot camp graduates. With less fashionable language that require significant expertise and experience in picking them up like C (understanding the hardware level) and Java (understanding the JVM and OOP concepts) the barriers of entry are much higher and this will mean you have to outrun fewer people in the long run to survive.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "Java (understanding the JVM and OOP concepts)" I am pretty sure that you can programm java without knowing details about the JVM and I would think, that most java programmers do exactly this. I think only in high performance scenarios knowing more is beneficial? But I have not touched java in a long time .. as I have indeed choosen the web as plattform. But I don't feel threatened by the high school kids coming from boot camps. Edit: I know what a pointer is, so I can work closely with wasm libaries. I know algorithms and how to structure data and why I am structuring data this way in this case, so I can adopt in another case. I know how to achieve performant simple code. I know how to debug layers of code with sideeffects over sideeffects. Raceconditions, memory leaks, etc. (All a thing in js, too). Using and understanding the profiler etc. Someone coming from a coding bootcamp, does not know this. He or she might learn it after years of practice, which is allright by me - but they are no direct threat to me, despite that I don't even really know react for example.
  - seniorivn 4y ago
    not feeling threatened doesn't mean you're not under threat. It's entirely possible that between your skill level and those boot campers is a few(dozen) percents of workforce. But at the same time it's entirely possible that if you are not as quickly progressing as the growth of the industry, you could become a part of the same percentile as bootcampers in no time.

throwthrowuknow 4y ago

Reskilling has its upsides, you are exposed to many more paradigms and communities that do things completely differently which allows for a lot of cross pollination. living life on autopilot isn’t usually a source of great insights.

ak_111 4y ago
Reskilling is much more productive and fun when you are doing it for the intellectual journey and insight, rather than because you need to do it to find a job. Indeed being able to auto-pilot your job allows you an amazing amount of time and freedom to learn new things deeply. See also the detrimental effects of "publish or perish" mindset in academia.

weatherlite 4y ago

I find it hard to believe people who learned Java don't have to learn new things every now and then. Yeah maybe they stuck to Java but the whole backend ecosystem looks way different than even 10 years ago. Even C is debatable.

ak_111 4y ago
Of course, everyone is always learning, you can't remain static. But you could afford to become more and more of a specialist in Java and growing your job opportunities that you can apply to. If you became more and more of a specialist in Perl on the other hand you would have had to completely relearn something new by now to find as many opportunities as you used to in the late 90s.
- weatherlite 4y ago
  I don't think it made a huge difference in most of these guys careers. I'm sure Perl "specialists" were able to move stacks if they wanted to...and you learn most of it on the job anyway so its not like you had to take a year off to catch up learning Java. So yeah it was a time investment for people but I don't think its as dramatic as you're making it seem. I'm saying this based on the fact the job market was amazing for software developers in the last decade or more. Things now might be different.

deleted 4y ago

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