Sometimes...

So... last night, one of the job agencies I fed my CV to, who knows I've actually accepted a position elsewhere, scattershot a plea for a 6 month PHP contract to a large list of people.

I dropped back a mostly polite note pointing out that this wasn't perhaps very smart. The reply:

"Unfortunatly you are included in the same file as PHP, along with every other perl developer."

Houston, we have a perception problem.

"OO Perl"

A couple of people on the use Perl; version of this blog picked up on my use of 'OO Perl' as a term, and were less than complimentary about the language's OO features. I'm not here to defend that: however, it set me thinking about why I used that term, and whether it was what I actually meant.

It was, at least in part, prompted by my job search (more on that later, I promise). Look down jobs.perl.org, and you'll find that most of the well-paying jobs mention, in some roundabout way, LAMP or a variant thereof, and stipulate 'OO Perl'. The fact that I had 'OO Perl' (and legitimately so) on my CV (resumé for you transPondials) was welcomed with open arms by several recruiters who absolutely couldn't wait to get my details to their clients.

I think, in the end, this goes back to some of the comments I made about the Swiss Army Chainsaw, specifically, the distinction between Perl scripters and Perl programmers. How do you tell if someone's the latter, if their CV just says 'Perl'?

I don't think 'OO Perl' necessarily has to mean, literally, Perl in the Perl5 "bless {};" way. What the recruiters are trying to say, I'm pretty sure, is 'someone who treats Perl like a high-level programming language'. 'OO Perl' is, if you like, a shibboleth, to find the programmers amid the scripters, since a scripter's response will be either 'huh?' or 'no, that's scary'. (Joking a little, but you get the point.) It isn't, by any means, a perfect test, but it seems to me that if someone both uses OO Perl, and consciously self-identifies as doing so, they fall on the 'programmer' side of the divide.

And of course the problem, both for the recruiters and for our definition of LAMP++, is that Perl the language doesn't mandate it. Any more, actually, than Java the language does. You can quite happily write little Java ten-liners to do some mundane task that mangles a file, and never consciously touch an OO feature of the language. You can write really bad Java just as much as you can really bad Perl.

But... and here's the kicker... The frameworks that most Java enterprise projects are written in pretty much do mandate an OO approach, and what my Uni lecturers would call 'good software engineering principles'. And that means that folks raised in that environment have it as a similar shibboleth to 'OO Perl' to prove their credentials in the Java world. Now sure, once you start using Class::DBI, Rose::DB or DBIx::Class for your DBI abstraction layer, or a goodly number of the popular CPAN modules, you're at least required to talk to them in an OO way. But there's nothing to stop your actual application code being a Big Ball Of Mud, a God Object, or any number of other anti-pattern horrors.

Which reminds me. I should talk about Design Patterns.

jobs.perl.org

So, here I am, with an uncomfortable sense of 'are my skills becoming obsolete?'.

$CurrentEmployer is, as I noted, predominantly a Java shop, and I have, in the past week, rolled out what's going to be the last piece of Perl development they need (modulo some differences of opinion between RedHat and Debian's default module setups, which means I'll be doing it all again today!). Which leaves me, pretty much, with the choices of: learn Java, or find a new job. Perl advocates the world over are no doubt cheering the fact that I made the second of those two choices. Let's face it, there wouldn't be much point in this blog otherwise: you'd be reading something called "A Perl Programmer's first steps in Java" instead.

Why? Well - two reasons, really.

First off, with what amounts to entry level Java skills plus (fortunately) a sound grasp of programming in and of itself, I'd be very much a junior developer, and while the idea of getting my teeth into a new language has a certain appeal, coming in well down the ladder, and spending most of my evenings drowning in J2EE acronym hell and a pile of "Learn $JavaThing in 30 Days" textbooks isn't my idea of fun.

And secondly? It's not Perl. For all this may not be clear in some of the previous postings, I love Perl, for its power and simplicity, for the fact that it /is/ a Swiss Army chainsaw, that I can do everything, from a one-liner to fix Apache2 module paths when porting from Debian to RedHat, to a complete CMS or banner ad serving engine, in the same language. And quite frankly? Java leaves me cold.

And it's jobs.perl.org to the rescue!

I'll admit, I was pleasantly surprised. There's a raft of Perl jobs up at the moment within commuting distance of where I live, mostly in London, and a surprising number that pay noticeably better than I'm currently earning (and are a good half an hour closer to home). In the context of this blog, they make interesting reading. A surprisingly large number mention 'OO Perl' as a requirement, and an equally, and almost correspondingly large, number mention LAMP, either by name or by implication.

By contrast, it's amusing searching the likes of Jobserve or Jobsite for jobs that mention Perl - what tends to come up is a lot of Java, .NET or sysadmin jobs with a little 'oh, and Perl scripting would be handy' coda tacked on the end. In fact, /all/ the jobs I've applied for this past week have come from jobs.perl.org.

So, gentle reader, you're probably wondering where that leaves our hero? Actually, not too badly off. But, more of that in a later post.