Why am I giving up on Perl? (edit: I didn't)
Tags: perl, community, toxicity, career
Published: 2021-08-02 20:46:42

I started using Perl in 2010. After years of a passionate use, I start to plan something else. Disclaimer: this is not because of *"the language"*.

*Note: at the end of August, after the publication of this post, some very ~~helpful~~ lovely persons came to me and the situation changed quite a bit. More on this later...*

## It is a real career issue

In my country of living, getting a Perl job is a real problem. I worked the last four years in a small team where all the projects were done using Perl and Mojolicious. As far as I know, even if I got fired for economic reasons linked to pandemic situation, all the applications I deployed there are still working well despite they are not maintained anymore (ouch).

Then, what I saw since March on the jobs market is: there is a niche of companies or organizations that still do an active use of Perl. What I notice is that they are all thinking of switching to other platform (maybe they are right, after all this is something that seem to go on since 15 years), and that there is no way new projects are developed with Perl. What I felt by talking with a CTO is that she hadn't any more trust with Perl: she was not able to recruit people. Therefore, they are hiding the Perl aspect in the jobs offers and then have even more difficulties finding people. Then, when they find some persons, they would even decide that, maybe, they should hire someone more versatile. And that person will be sad, maintaining some Perl, can you imagine this hell?

I mean, this is a kind of very sad waste. 

```perl
say 'help';
```

I missed two opportunities based on the fact that I was not a polyglot enough. I know Java, JavaScript, Perl, quite enough of various web technologies like HTML and CSS, but still, I don't know something like Go, Python, you know this stuff is real trendy! I don't value the idea of *polyglotism* a lot, because I prefer to focus on something, and also, I am not really able to learn a lot of programming languages. I know this is not a very popular opinion, and now I feel like in trouble. So I'll try to improve myself.

It would still be possible to switch to Raku. This is a fantastic language, and I would really like to involve myself into it, but seriously, I need to pay my bills. I mean, the probability to find a Raku job in my country is... Small?

## Lack of gender equality and diversity in the communities

The Perl communities are dominated by mostly men. There are rare persons who advocate for diversity and inclusivity, but honestly, if it exists at some conferences, it is not what is spread by the communities: just check the stats of Perl Weekly contributors or other popular Perl cultural items, this is the same-old men-leaded-content everywhere with very little exceptions.

If I decide to go away from this community, I will at least contribute to reduce the gender gap. Plus, it will be one grumpy person less.

## Recent communities issues are awfully worrying

Perl has a number of toxic community members, this is not new. They are armful to other, and I got very shocked of some events that happened recently. I'll focus here exclusively on the victims.

Sawyer X, *pumpkin* of Perl since 2016 resigned of their responsibilities after being [victim of harassment](https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/13/perl_dev_quits/). It is unacceptable that a person enduring such responsibilities are bullied by communities members.  

Wendy totally vanished of the Perl communities after years of active quality work for the advocacy of Perl. I am totally sure I would have never been interested in Perl that much without Wendy. She encouraged me, her talks and the way she was engaged marked me forever. She gave me a *Learning Perl* book copy, and sent me to Curtis Ovid Poe to ask for a signature. Meeting her was a major event in my Perl career, and I made a very good use of this gift. From what I understood, it was partly the Raku renaming that took her away, but I suppose it is more the talks and difficult interactions that happened at this time. I don't know where you are now, Wendy, and how you are doing, but I wanted to thank you.

The Mojolicious community recently denounced a racist issue in a CPAN distribution to TPF, and after it didn't get answered accurately, pointed a conflict of interest inside TPF itself. Result: nothing. 

All those, and the lack of reactions from the communities members, continuing to do their release and challenges and blog posts as if everything was going fine, all of this made me sick. And you know what? I don't even want to participate in this a lot, even if I will always love the language in itself and have a good memory of my time around Perl, and it's communities. I guess I have been marked by a very small amount of personalities, that inspired me a lot of love and motivation, but what I am seeing right now, this is not where I want to be. 

## Modern Perl, Perl7, Corinna

All this is very exciting, seriously, I mean it. When the Perl7 announcement came, I felt really, something will be going to happen. Then I saw all the discourse and the doubt it created, and I got afraid.

In 2021, I feel like that there are a lot of codebases that still didn't incorporate the Modern Perl ideas. It's rare to see usages of subroutines signatures, even if the feature is (experimentally) around since 2015.

Corinna, and its possible implementation, [Object::Pad](https://metacpan.org/pod/Object::Pad) looks to progress real well, and I am almost sure it will be usable soon.

## Conclusion

But still, I am not patient enough, and I need to get a job: unfortunately, it looks like managers and CTOs lost the confidence in Perl, and that Perl codebases should be only fixed: new code should be written in other languages. Again, this is only what I saw in France, maybe it is different in other countries, and this is not what I wish, since I have been a Perl enthusiast since 2010, and wrote new web applications 100% with Perl in the 4 last years. I wish I could find more context for this incomprehensible Perl love, but for the above reasons, I'll have to go search somewhere else. It must be [a good decision](https://dev.to/smonff/i-started-studying-python3-2pga), I guess...

```python
import antigravity
```

Note: I received lots of support and advices after posting this. I am grateful to the people who helped me.