I make my entire living modernizing various firms' perl stacks.
There is a never-ending amount of work for people who are good at modernizing older mod_perl/cgi stacks into psgi, and profiling/optimizing stuff.
Where I see perl going:
I see the big firms running away from it as fast as they can, and getting pikachu face when they inevitably get second-system effect, but nevertheless doubling down, because admitting failure is a no-no unless during a reorg.
I see the mittlestand and small biz expanding their existing use of perl, as they cannot afford to re-tool.
Perl programmers will continue to have active careers for another 20 years, which is at least as long as I need to remain employed.
The language itself will continue to evolve at a snails' pace due to being design-by-committee since our BDFL retired. Thankfully this doesn't seem to be a particularly serious problem, as no advances in programming language design have come forth which are the kind of quantum leap in either dev productivity or performance to matter for our use cases.
There is a never-ending amount of work for people who are good at modernizing older mod_perl/cgi stacks into psgi, and profiling/optimizing stuff.
Where I see perl going:
I see the big firms running away from it as fast as they can, and getting pikachu face when they inevitably get second-system effect, but nevertheless doubling down, because admitting failure is a no-no unless during a reorg.
I see the mittlestand and small biz expanding their existing use of perl, as they cannot afford to re-tool. Perl programmers will continue to have active careers for another 20 years, which is at least as long as I need to remain employed.
The language itself will continue to evolve at a snails' pace due to being design-by-committee since our BDFL retired. Thankfully this doesn't seem to be a particularly serious problem, as no advances in programming language design have come forth which are the kind of quantum leap in either dev productivity or performance to matter for our use cases.