Among the many dynamic scripting languages, Perl seems to be a forgotten sibling, unsupported by new APIs. In this modern age of programming, Hiring Managers are always eager to hire the developer who knows the latest and greatest framework. For a while, Ruby on Rails stole the show as the framework to use in order to bootstrap your app.

Now, Python’s in the limelight as the de facto language for coding machine learning algorithms. JavaScript even entered the fray recently with Node, which allowed JavaScript-centric organizations to create a linguistically monolithic stack. Then you have PHP, practically the dynamic language of the internet; 30% of websites use Wordpress, a CMS built on PHP.

Comparatively, Perl doesn’t fall into a recognizable niche. The problem with that lies in the reason Perl was created in the first place. The language, created by the Larry Wall in 1987, was designed to be more of a Swiss Army knife — as opposed to a language like C, which seeks to optimize memory usage.

The idea behind the language was to counter the complexity of C by providing a language that was easy to use and quick to write. Jeremy Pickett, a former PayPal developer said when referring to Perl, “It is a seriously good multi-platform, easy to learn, easy to port language that can save your bacon. Centos 5.x memory debug? No problem. Windows 2k8 registry audit? Let’s go! Web server? Done and done. Pen testing tool? Don’t even get me started.”

Jeremy’s quote fits the principle of the Perl language, which is, “get the job done.” An experienced developer can immediately see the problem that then arises when you want to hire a developer who’s ethos is to use a monkey wrench to solve a problem when an elegant solution can be had. And because the barrier to competence is so low due to the one size fits all philosophy of the language, you have a pool of mediocre talent who’ve probably only learned Perl to deal with automation issues.

To compound this problem of availability, the problems that Perl attempts to solve are in-house. You don’t really need a Perl developer until you need one, in a sense. Companies aren’t building their tech stacks with Perl, they’re just solving industry specific problems with the language, problems that don’t require a team of developers. This means Computer Science students eager for work, will likely ignore Perl in favor of Python or C++.

This is not to say that there aren’t great Perl developers out there. The Perl 5 community features CPAN, a library of modules created by Perl developers. You can find active developers on PerlMonks and Perl’s subreddit. Perl Mongers is a group of Perl developers who meet locally to discuss changes to the language.

The talent is out there. It’s up to a Hiring Manager to know who to look for and what to ask. Wall saw how accessible Ruby was and decided to make a Perl version of it, saying in a conference in 2000, “In Perl 6, we decided it would be better to fix the language than fix the user.”

Perl 6 fixed some issues, but the community is small and there are very few reliable modules for a developer to work with. For now, the only recourse is to focus on the current Perl 5 developers. Within that pool, you want to select developers who have matured beyond the Perl philosophy and have applied practices like continuous integration that ensure that their code is maintainable and, thus, scalable.

Note: Perl 6(Raku) is distinct from Perl 5. Raku is a pivot from Perl in general, which lends some credence to the issues with Perl as a language.