The Director of Engineering at ActiveState attempts to make the case that Perl Isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever). Certainly he has some stake in such a prediction being that he's at a company that makes its money from dyanamic languages such as Perl. Does he make the case?

My current employer is hiring Perl developers. Now, I have no illusions that hundreds, or even dozens, of people read this blog, but, should you stumble upon this blog posting, please contact OpenX and we'll get back to you.

Is there a contradiction between employers complaining about the quality of Perl job applicants and Perl programmers complaining about the quality of Perl jobs available?

I don't know anything about the book so this is not an endorsement. However, be aware, that Addison-Wesley has released a free chapter for the upcoming Perl book Effective Perl Programming.

It may be worth a look.

I was unaware of the effort (and, besides, I don't have an Android phone), but apparently the effort to have Perl running on the Android OS is progressing.

The title of this post is also the title of a post by JT Smith. He thinks that, because of Moose and other interesting technologies, Perl has its second wind. Well, here's hoping.

Related somewhat is a presentation by Tim Bunce entitled Perl Myths.

Chromatic has written a nice blog post detailing what the big deal is with Perl 5.12. It talks about the new release schedule and the important new features in 5.12.

Perl 5.12 has been released. Go here to find out what is new (since 5.10.1).

Some may be surprised that 5.12 has come out so soon after 5.10. After all its only been two and a half years since 5.10.0 was released. It seems the perl5porters are now on a new release cycle.

So is Perl trending up? This report seems to suggest that it is (and Delphi? Seriously?). Granted it didn't move up a lot, but it did go up. I think this is a good thing. As an aside I am happy to see C doing so well. I started off as a C programmer and I have mostly fond memories.

I have no idea how much stock to put into these popularity indexes. It can make for spirited conversation though.

Ovid, someone who seems to spend a lot of time thinking about testing, asks a question that I have also been asking, "What are the definitions for standard testing methodologies?" The answer appears to be: the definitions are nebulous (at best).

Subversions's CMike (C. Michael Pilato) submitted the vision statement I mentioned just a few days ago. See what you think.

Okay, the title of this post is not exactly the vibe you get from reading this , but it is a bit on the brighter side than his previous post.

I've been using Subversion since about version 0.12 (released sometime in 2002 I imagine). I've been on the dev and user mailing lists for just as long. Since that time version control systems have seen major improvements. It's hard to believe that the best open source version control system ten years ago was CVS. There are now a wealth of systems and most of them are targeted at a distributed development model. One thing that distinguishes Subversion from the others is that it continues in the tradition of a centralized repository and has eschewed the trend toward decentralization. I think it's great that there are now so many choices. I also hope to see Subversion continue to thrive, and so I was pleased to see several posts about a recent Subversion Vision Conference. The conference was really an informal gathering of a small number of Subversion developers and their attempt to plan a roadmap for the next few years of svn development. The roadmap is currently unpublished and unofficial, but I expect that it will appear, in some form, sometime soon.

In yet another post related to a number of posts I have already made there is this post by Sawyer X. It amazes me that there are non-Perl developers who believe what this (unnamed) developer says. If this is a widespread belief (and I think it may be) than Perl is in some trouble.

Gabor Szabo says that Perl needs more "young enthusiastic developers." Apparently even the Germans are having difficulty finding Perl developers. At my previous job and at my current job we are having a hard time finding developers (not just Perl developers), but Perl developers do seem to be more difficult.

Unfortunately stating, "We need more young, enthusiastic developers" isn't a solution. Gabor goes on to say that existing Perl advocates should help companies find these developers. I'm not quite sure how that is supposed to work (and isn't this more a function for something like perlmongers or Perl Advocates?). If I work for a company that needs Perl developers I will attempt to find Perl developers, but it's not like there is some magic box that Perl developers receive that keeps "young, enthusiastic" developers in stasis. There is simply more demand for Perl developers than there are hirable Perl developers. Companies will either slowly move away from Perl or supply will eventually catch up with demand (due to any number of factors).