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Comment by cutler | Hacker News Reader

Another benefit of legacy niche languages, such as Perl, is less ageism. Clojure is a real joy to work with. Ruby is in an interesting phase approaching niche status with correspondingly high rates.

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Yeah, Perl - thats my niche language. Most interviews are like, 'You know Perl right ?' followed by 'When can you start ?'. And even though the number of openings is small, the pay is good enough to overcome few weeks/months of unpaid vacation if needed ;)

I assume these are Perl 5 jobs, not Perl 6?

I think everyone working in perl 6 calls it Raku now. Perl generally means perl 5 (or possibly older versions in a really legacy environment).

My first internship was trying to figure out all the Perl scripts left behind by a sysadmin who got fired. I learned a lot that summer. I really learned to like Perl after writing my own programs in in, and making sure to document them well!

I've thought of returning to working with Perl but the one thing which puts me off is Catalyst.

I was flabbergasted once to see Perl rates right up at the top with Clojure and Scala but I suppose Perl's a bit like COBOL these days in that only greybeards still work with it.

Perl aficionado here! Thanks to Amazon, the cool new replacement for Perl seems to be Python, even though it’s only about 4 years younger, so most younger devs I know aren’t even aware of Perl’s existence. While Perl may not be used in too many legacy Enterprise applications, it certainly is the “glue” of many legacy systems. Plus, every once in a while I get to dust off my Perl skills and wow my colleagues with how easy it is to do file I/O and regex in just a few lines with no libraries. It certainly gives me a skills advantage.

>"Thanks to Amazon, the cool new replacement for Perl seems to be Python,..." Interesting, is it Amazon as in AWS that make heavy use on Python then? If so I'm curious is this for specific areas within AWS? I always imagined AWS to be lots of systems programming languages.

AWS was built mainly with Java as far as I'm aware.

Amazon used to have a lot of Perl code. So it's all moved to Python? Give me Larry over Guido any day.

I wonder if Python has yet reached legacy status when it comes to web development. A quick skim of the schedule for this year's PyCon US suggests that maybe it has.

I doubt it as most job boards I've seen have 3 or 4 Django roles for every Rails role.

> Ruby is in an interesting phase approaching niche status with correspondingly high rates.

native iOS in objective-c is getting there too, I think. I see a lot of job listings for it with surprisingly high rates considering everybody is supposed to be shifting to Swift.

I have not seen such listings for a couple of years now, where do you find them?

You haven't been looking at all! Most large companies that pay pretty well still use Objective-C. Meta, Google, Snap, Netflix... etc... and of course Apple.

The others do still have lots of Objective-C, mixed with Swift (eg. Linkedin, Reddit, etc, slowly transitioning to Swfit).

Airbnb and Uber are the only one that use mostly/exclusively Swift from the Faangmula companies. Most small Startups, that were started after 2016 use mostly/only Swift, but most large companies still do have a lot of Objective-C code.

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