Please do not be alarmed, I made the flight, all is fine.
Spoke last night at LA.pm, giving a preview of my "Nothing can possibly go wrong" talk. Of course, due to the fact Australia won their world cup game, I struggled to make it back back to Jeff Goff's place (who is kindly hosting me here in LA) in time to finish all the slides before the talk, so it was executed a little wonky in places. But that is expected for beta runs of talks.
Thanks to everyone from LA.pm for putting up with the beta talk's nigglies.
But generally the talk seemed well received, with most people not knowing about the various ways to screw up I describe in the talk, and some good questions that reminded me bits I missed (like the original story of how I screwed up and partially wasted two years of my life as a result).
At dinner afterwards, there was much discussion about the current "drought" of Perl coders. Very difficult to find decent Perl people at the moment in America, which backs up other evidence I have of the same situation in Europe and Australia.
While it's good that wages for Perl programmers (certainly ones flexible about where they live) are sky high at the moment, it's a very very bad long term position, as companies will move to other languages. That said, even at the higher prices a lot of the time I suspect it is tolerated if only because a good Perl programmer can be so productive.
This sort of productivity advantage is excellent, and a good way to make Perl people WORTH the higher money, because they still get a lot more done in comparison.
There seemed to be general agreement that having Windows become a first class platform would help take us some way towards fixing the problem. Chocolate Perl simply can't come quickly enough I think.
On the subject of http://win32.perl.org it looks like we have a winner in the logo competition. Thomas Wittek's second entry seems to be widely acclaimed as an excellent design concept, and so now we just need to get it cleaned up.
If anyone knows a designer type who can SVG'ise the logo so we can manipulate it more, let me know. I will note though it's not something I'd like to have to spend money on if I can avoid it...
Finally, wxPerl 0.50 is finally out!
This is the first production version to use the new Alien::wxWidgets integration, and should be much more workable for people.
Because Wx is one of the keystones of the "Desktop Perl" concept, I'd love to see as many people as possible trying to install this, and providing feedback via RT of the problems they encounter installing it.
And now back to making Powerpoint behave... (because OOo 2.0 won't let me embed video and I have something special planned) :)
...much discussion about the current "drought" of Perl coders. Very difficult to find decent Perl people at the moment... While it's good that wages for Perl programmers (certainly ones flexible about where they live) are sky high at the moment...
Er, where ? A quick scan of DICE indicates there are certainly lots of Perl positions (which in turn calls into question the perception of Perl's "slow death", as recently expounded in p5p). Yet, for those few job posts which provide a salary or contract rate, the numbers are pretty low. The few instances where salaries/rates seem decent, are located in very high cost areas (NY, NY; SillyCon Valley; LA, CA; etc.). And many of those Perl positions are just glorified sysadmin jobs, or mundane QA jobs (not a slam on QA..but spending 90% of one's day rerunning the same tests over and over isn't likely to attract/retain high quality developers).
Meanwhile, Java developers can still pull down very serious bucks in pretty much any market (despite its far less productive/nimble programming discipline), even with lots of offshoring to hold down wages. Since a "decent" Perl person is probably also a "decent" Java/C++/etc. person, the choice will usually come down to money and convenience. Given a choice on which professional path to follow, money talks, and Perl is being shouted down by Java and C#. If I can get paid more to grind out Java or C++ where I live, I'm not likely to pack up and move someplace for less money just to work on Perl.
Given that your comments arose after a meeting with LA.pm, I'd suggest the complaints you're hearing are directly related to the fact that people with good Perl skills usually have decent math skills. And so they realize that living in LA now requires > $120K/year to have any hope of quality of life (e.g., owning a home within 45 minutes of work, being able to save for retirement, etc.). Since that kind of income is probably impossible to achieve as a Perl developer - or even manager of Perl developers - many of us have left to find more reasonable places to call "home". I'd suggest that, if your audience is serious about finding quality Perl developers, maybe they need to be a bit more flexible - and realistic - about where those developers can afford to live on the wages they're willing to pay.
I also have a hunch that there's some middleman inflation in the system; I know of a couple recent Perl posts with < $45/hr rates for which the employer was paying closer to $90/hr. So both the constractor and the employer were getting screwed. (Smells a bit like the mid-90's again). I'm also surprised by the relatively few posts to jobs.perl.org compared to the major job boards. I'd think that employers looking for quality Perl people would know about j.p.o by now.
As to the situation being "very very bad" for Perl, I'd suggest that, if the wage situation is as good as you contend - even tho I don't subscribe to that belief - it will actually attract more talent to Perl.
