What’s wrong with letting the language die?
I don’t use it anymore because of the culture of hating on it from non-users, who have just hounded users so much that they have succeeded in dampening the fun a lot. I mean you can’t even talk about it in HN without encountering some serious negativity, usually uninformed. It’s unpleasant.
On the good side, there are other great languages that don’t have this problem.
Sunken costs fallacy would apply if someone said "well, I spent so much time learning it, I might as well keep using it even though the environment is so hostile."
So, that's exactly the path I'm not taking. I'm disregarding any sunken costs. The sunken costs fallacy applies to those who would cling on to a path, not those who leave it.
But maybe you're using it from a different perspective.
Is that better than driving Perl 5 to a stable end? I don't really think so. But I'm not involved in the development of Perl, I'll just keep writing Perl scripts until it gets hard to install.
If your result for inaction is eventual death anyway, then the sensible thing is to go out swinging. At least that way you have a half chance of reviving the language — which is better than the zero chance you have if you do nothing.
Also a company with a huge Perl code base there is large value in new developers who can become productive without much special training.
You shouldn't hang your career on any one language. But languages themselves are almost trivial.
Knowledge of libraries, and community expectations around them, doesn't translate well between languages.
And personal libraries, laden with solutions for the domains you've tended to specialise in, don't translate at all. You basically have to start from scratch, which is a huge loss if they are genuinely useful and took years to develop and accumulate.
You can't just rewrite those quickly, and you're unlikely to find a third party library in any language that solves the same problems.
I can see how this may be meaningless to someone whose career consists of moving from company to company, never carrying anything forward other than what's in their head. But some people carry forward substantial personal libraries which they use.
The loss of those can easily be a 10x loss in productivity, so switching to a new language and its entire ecosystem can be a big and expensive step, compared with not doing so.
Yes, over a career you can become expert in several. I would even say quite a lot. And yes, you can always learn new things.
But there will be times when you lose a lot of your advantages due to starting from scratch with something new. That's a big cost, it shouldn't be ignored.
When it's necessary, such as learning an ML framework, say, it's a justified cost, and everyone pays it.
But when it's just due to changing fashions it's a bit galling, and difficult to justify when is the right time. So much is lost.
A rather low-level example (nothing like understanding good abstraction/design), but useful because it's apparently not obvious - co-workers didn't believe it until I demonstrated with short example programs: Reference semantics are identical between javascript, python, and java.
(The first two being the primary languages we use, I don't remember how java came up that day - I know others are also the same)
that said I don't know what kind of "special training" you need to pick up a new language. I got hired for a perl job despite never having written it. the conversation went something like "can you write c?" "yep." "can you write shell scripts?" "yep." "ok, you can write perl." read what the sigils meant and could write it with minimal competence same day. expertise and nuance can come as you go