This is part of the programming industry, but it's not the whole thing. I'm reminded of the story of a bunch of blind people all describing different parts of a

This is part of the programming industry, but it's not the whole thing. I'm reminded of the story of a bunch of blind people all describing different parts of an elephant. You move your hand around a bit and it sort of all feels the same, but that doesn't mean you've touched the whole elephant! Elephants are big. This part in particular stood out: > thousands of lines of unmaintainable spaghetti code engineers were bullied into writing in weeks instead of months using arbitrary trendy technologies. This is not my experience at all. I have 2 part-time jobs writing Perl code, and at both of those jobs the people I encounter are thoughtful and intelligent and want to do a good job (including managers). Nobody is bullied into anything. Nobody wants thousands of lines of new code. We have enough thousands of lines of old code that nobody understands :). Your experience of the programming industry very much depends on what part of it you work in, and specifically who you work with. But I think if you want to "quit the rat race", Perl is a good choice, because everyone who wants to rush around chasing fashion trends left Perl behind a long time ago. Also, I'm told Perl developers are getting harder to find so salaries are going up.