I was a web developer working nearly exclusively in Perl during the time period the author describes. I understand the author's lack of a handle on the period as he was, as he describes, in middle school at the time. Me, I had a job and a family and I was an actual Perl programmer. Come at me bro.
That aside, the description of a transition of developers from Perl to Python just didn't happen the way it is described in the article. Or, to be fair, it didn't happen that way for me.
I worked on a team extracting data from a number of disparate data sources and presenting reports on the web - basically the idiomatic Perl task. We tried to bring in PHP for a bit but found it wanting. As our jobs evolved out from under us, each of us moved on from Perl. Reporting jobs were becoming largely obsolete and there was market demand for working in other languages elsewhere. Being the early oughts, most of the engineers I knew had at least a few languages in their repertoire.
Of the developers I worked with, I was the only one to pick up Python. I remember feeling like I wanted to work with a dynamic language where OO was more core to the language feature set. Ruby and Python were both viable, though less known, options. I don't remember why I chose Python over Ruby, but I did.
My colleagues went on to work in Java or C#. Over time, I did a bit of both as well, especially C#. One buddy of mine still does his personal and peripheral scripting in Perl. I've largely forgotten the language.
Back on topic, I simply did not see an exodus of developers from Perl to Python. It just didn't happen that way within my community. Jobs got phased out, new ones began, often with new tools.
Off topic, what I did see at the time was a large movement of COBOL developers to JAVA. I saw that as a genuine migration, in earnest, of developers who were facing obsolescence.
What is not clear to me is what the author has been doing for a living during these last few years. I can remember getting started doing web development way back in the Perl/CGI days, before JavaScript libraries and massive web frameworks were common, and I can remember getting overwhelmed even then. I can remember trying to learn OO first in Perl and quitting before coming back to it from another language a year later.
Point is, programming is hard, but to me "being a programmer" means being a programmer as a job, where a) you have to solve problems for a living and b) you don't get to quit.
Where I feel the author is screwing herself is the endless stream of tutorials, coupled with drinking from the firehose. The language and the frameworks are two different problems that must be tackled, I think, in two different ways. For example, when learning to code for iOS, it's not Objective-C that gets you, it's the new environment, frameworks and libraries. However, you don't get to quit and say, "I could have done this in Wordpress."
I'm rambling. Point? Get a job as a programmer, paint yourself into that corner and stay there. It has been said earlier, and I agree: commit to one language/framework. Learn it really well. THEN, and this is after 5 years or so, language hop all you want with a more robust understanding of programming in general.
I was a web developer working nearly exclusively in Perl during the time period the author describes. I understand the author's lack of a handle on the period as he was, as he describes, in middle school at the time. Me, I had a job and a family and I was an actual Perl programmer. Come at me bro.
That aside, the description of a transition of developers from Perl to Python just didn't happen the way it is described in the article. Or, to be fair, it didn't happen that way for me.
I worked on a team extracting data from a number of disparate data sources and presenting reports on the web - basically the idiomatic Perl task. We tried to bring in PHP for a bit but found it wanting. As our jobs evolved out from under us, each of us moved on from Perl. Reporting jobs were becoming largely obsolete and there was market demand for working in other languages elsewhere. Being the early oughts, most of the engineers I knew had at least a few languages in their repertoire.
Of the developers I worked with, I was the only one to pick up Python. I remember feeling like I wanted to work with a dynamic language where OO was more core to the language feature set. Ruby and Python were both viable, though less known, options. I don't remember why I chose Python over Ruby, but I did.
My colleagues went on to work in Java or C#. Over time, I did a bit of both as well, especially C#. One buddy of mine still does his personal and peripheral scripting in Perl. I've largely forgotten the language.
Back on topic, I simply did not see an exodus of developers from Perl to Python. It just didn't happen that way within my community. Jobs got phased out, new ones began, often with new tools.
Off topic, what I did see at the time was a large movement of COBOL developers to JAVA. I saw that as a genuine migration, in earnest, of developers who were facing obsolescence.