I learnt perl for work related stuff in 1999-2000. Before that I had seen perl being used in shell scripting and CGI programs as a student. I had copies of Learning Perl and the perl CGI books. Perl was undisputed king of scripting and text processing.

As a programmer, I had looked at python and could not discern any obvious advantage in 2000-2004 period. Whatever python could do, perl could do more and had the vast CPAN repository. perl had more mind share, maybe also because of CPAN (People do not realize how big a deal CPAN was) People were still writing ODBC drivers in C, so the complexity of perl was not a huge deviation from normal affair of things. How was perl any different from Java AWT mess or complexity of SOAP?

Cut to 2025 and the world is very different. I have been training new folks joining from college and I do not think anyone has asked about perl in last 10 years even as a curiosity. After 2015-16 and ML boom, it has been python all the way. I am not sure where TIOBE is getting its data or methodology but young people sure are not picking perl.

I am from India and I have worked with American companies in the past, though not in an outsourcing kind of situation. While I understand

+ the anger (I would be too if jobs from here were shifted to Timbaktu for example)
+ and I understand the under-the-table tactics of Indian outsourcing companies operating in India,

I would like to add my 0.02$ to the debate. First, I have never seen expert jobs being outsourced. Most of the companies I know of, talk about outsourcing un-important parts, something that is not critical to business. Expert jobs are not outsourced, product management is not outsourced, sales jobs are not outsourced. Fact is, If you are working for one of these companies in India, you have a clear sense that you are no-where near decision centers. So important things are still in US, even for technology companies. The very fact that the management is ready to go to a lower bidder underlines the fact that the pieces are not important. The counterparts I knew and respected for skill are still employed and much in demand.

Second, all such debated necessarily assume that people who instead of US folks finally get to do these jobs are morons. That is a naive assumption. Maybe these jobs were actually low skill jobs to begin with or lot of people in US were living under a false assumption that they were "doing technology". I know enough morons working in US offices who should have been fired a long ago. The only advantage these people had that they were born in a good place and nothing else. It would be nice if someone could present an alternate version of this story as well. If nothing then just to balance the debate a little bit.

I am not sure that 12.04 LTS is that rock stable. I installed 12.04 on rackspace (using their image) and mysql refused to start because of some AppArmor bug. If you search launchpad you can get that bug. Now mysql is a big and fairly known package and lot of people would be using it on server. Now I understand the rationale of "it will be fixed soon", "someone already has the hack" and "you fix it, you did not pay for it". However just imagine how surprised you would be it it were an LTS release. I do not think Debian stable would have given someone such a jolt.

Hi
can you please post the party details on your twitter/Google+ pages? We would not want to miss out interested folks!

I started off with RedHat (5.2) days and stuck with it for a long time. I guess part of the reason was that my work also required working on Linux machines and office was using RedHat and later CentOs. I stopped using Linux for a while and then I wanted to try it again on a laptop, a 2004 model iBook.

I think I tried Ubuntu because I had heard it could support my wireless driver without doing any compilation chores on my part. The first Ubuntu CD I got was in probably 2007 (Ubuntu 7) and then I stuck with Ubuntu till 2011. It was more like a side affair. However since last year my work machine has again been a Linux machine. I was happy with Ubuntu but I wanted to try Debian just for curiosity's sake. No big reasons or plans.

I guess after using things daily and getting back in groove I was no longer in need of "polish" and "out-of-box". I tried Debian Testing with Gnome3/XFCE and then moved to crunch-bang12. Partly it was my search to make my desktop my way since I spend almost all my time on Linux now. I do not think I will try anything new sooner. I like the feel of an icon less desktop and arbitrary control. My desktop, my way.

To summarize RedHat -> Ubuntu -> Debian

second that. which serious professional is still with Apache + mod_php? excuse me please! The serious professional world (at least the people who can decide their destiny) has already moved to NGINX

I agree with the part that X lets you display what is happening on remote machine to your local terminal (virtualization) part. Just sending the bitmaps/buffers back and forth is very primitive (VNC) and does not perform well. And yes, people short circuiting that part just to say that yeah! everything is running on this box only miss that part. on the other hand, X is old and crumbling around and I am not sure about the audio/video etc support for modern devices and hardware. Maybe an X done for today;s world is the answer.

The poster has changed
[Every time you log in to any service that uses a plain HTTP connection that's essentially what you're doing.] to
>>Every time you log in to Twitter, Facebook or any other service that uses a plain HTTP connection and that is not accurate. The Facebook login page uses https.

At work I have a wyse xenith thin client on my desk that I use with Xen Desktop 5 VDI. I use Xen desktop to launch VM templates that contain my development tools like perforce and visual studio. I really do not feel any difference between using my laptop or the thin client when I am on my desk. The only advantage I can see for the laptop is portability.