I have been building large Perl web and automation apps for about 20 years now and I haven't ever had problems finding work maintaining existing applications.
My last corp job was for a large drug testing laboratory and their whole show was run in Perl -- two large apps: one web app that I wrote, another that ran all the processing/automation. Both were over 300k+ lines of super clean, maintainable Perl code in a CI/CD pipeline and deployed to AWS ECS.
There hasn't been much new built using only Perl for 8-10 years, except by older devs that need a job (eg: me). Python has taken over Perl's niche for 'gluing together the internet', PHP5 took over the 'quick and dirty website' niche that Perl+Apache/cgi/mod_perl never made simple.
Most of the Perl code you see is unmaintainable because it was written by people that weren't software engineers ... they Google'd (or AltaVista'd) and cut/pasted bad code together until something worked. There are hundreds of JavaScript devs entering the market every year that aren't very good either, but the modern JavaScript tooling is super simple to use and makes it hard to spit out terrible code ... and Perl's tooling falls short or is difficult to get going.
These days I make my money maintaining older Perl codebases and helping (or convincing) companies it is time to convert the app to NodeJS or Python before there aren't any of us old farts (41) left to run it.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
I have been building large Perl web and automation apps for about 20 years now and I haven't ever had problems finding work maintaining existing applications.
My last corp job was for a large drug testing laboratory and their whole show was run in Perl -- two large apps: one web app that I wrote, another that ran all the processing/automation. Both were over 300k+ lines of super clean, maintainable Perl code in a CI/CD pipeline and deployed to AWS ECS.
There hasn't been much new built using only Perl for 8-10 years, except by older devs that need a job (eg: me). Python has taken over Perl's niche for 'gluing together the internet', PHP5 took over the 'quick and dirty website' niche that Perl+Apache/cgi/mod_perl never made simple.
Most of the Perl code you see is unmaintainable because it was written by people that weren't software engineers ... they Google'd (or AltaVista'd) and cut/pasted bad code together until something worked. There are hundreds of JavaScript devs entering the market every year that aren't very good either, but the modern JavaScript tooling is super simple to use and makes it hard to spit out terrible code ... and Perl's tooling falls short or is difficult to get going.
These days I make my money maintaining older Perl codebases and helping (or convincing) companies it is time to convert the app to NodeJS or Python before there aren't any of us old farts (41) left to run it.