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Comment by byroot | Hacker News Reader

> In particular the comment about the inability to find senior developers in PERL.

One thing to know is that Manwin (youporn, pornhub, etc parent company) is located in Montreal. For a reason I can't really explain, you mostly find PHP and C# developers here, so most Montreal startups are PHP based.

I also interviewed a couple Manwin alumnis, and they told me that they were a couple hundred developers and that there is a huge turnover (you often see a 6 month / 1 year experience at Manwin when you read a PHP dev resume).

So it's easy to understand that they prefer to use the local dominant language, it do not mean that Perl is globally dying, just that they have specific constraints. And to be fair Perl is not the only small community in MTL, Ruby and Python also have a strangely small community here.

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> For a reason I can't really explain, you mostly find PHP and C# developers here

Same here in Vancouver; I always figured the C# part was just our proximity to Redmond (and then PHP because it's the only language that doesn't impinge upon C#'s niche) but I guess it's more of a Canada-wide thing. Weird.

In the Phoenix area C# is king, followed by Java. Most development tends to be around business' internal applications... I've seen a small bit of PHP, Ruby and Python though... In the past two years NodeJS has probably passed them all, aside from C# for new development around here.

Maybe it has to do with what the local college CS department standardizes on.

Finding the same thing here in Toronto, to the point of where I've seen two perl developer positions advertised here since I came back in early '12. Meanwhile there's tons of (usually poorly paying) PHP gigs, along with Java, and to a slightly lesser extent, C, C# and mobile. That being said, I found the two Perl places to be very accepting of those that didn't have experience in Perl, but in other languages (and wanted to escape to something better). Can't say the same for other language shops.

tl;dr Perl devs seem to be in short supply country wide, along with jobs that would need their skillset.

other Montrealer here - I also wondered why that is. Especially considering the amount of gaming companies around here, you'd think a lot of C++ would be in order. I have met quite a few rubyists, but python seems rarely used. PHP coders were always available, wherever I lived though :)

I've found in my job searching over the last few years that if you have a resume with good ruby chops, Montreal is the place to go. Seems to have the largest share of jobs in that area, at least from what I've seen.

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