Is Perl losing its shine as it now needs to compete with many other alternative programming languages? Can Perl be considered a good career choice today? To find out, we have interviewed an experienced Perl developer and geekuni.com founder Andrew Solomon.
Q1. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
I was born in Sydney, Australia and my first experience of programming was writing code to generate Mandelbrot fractals on my mother's computer. In my mid-teens I was brain washed by popular science (mostly theoretical physics) but when I started at university my passion for physics was nipped in the bud after a term in the lab and the realization that most theory comes from observation of the world around us. As a result, I wound up doing a PhD in pure mathematics – which I relished since the only constraints were a few axioms which left great scope for creativity. After that I spent the best part of a decade taking academic jobs in Sydney, St Andrews and Vancouver pursuing every opportunity to experience other cultures, visiting colleagues in Austin, Paris, Beijing, Saint Petersburg and many interesting places in-between. It was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed doing research and teaching, with quite a lot of it in computer science and programming.
On a flight to Berlin in 2004 I met someone special who turned out to live in London. Since then I've gradually settled down in London and got a stable job as a software developer. That said, teaching is still my passion and I'm now doing that at my own online school - Geekuni.