Perl is not trendy. Companies, even those that use it extensively never communicate about it and there are no publicly visible ads on job boards. Doesn’t mean that there’s not code to maintain and projects building up.
Personally I never had a Perl contract by searching for the companies. I identified as a Perl specialist on my LinkedIn profile and some people searching for help contacted me.
Recently I have been contacted by some headhunters for something about « defense » in UK but did not manage to know more about it. Also check « aviation in Brusells », or « billing, payment, finance » in France.
For public sector: EPFL (Lausanne science and technology university and labs) and Genève public judiciary system. May be in the process of rewriting to other languages, as booking.com does (Java notably). But there will be legacy code still.
Some of the deleted pages never had the « sources missing » tag set for a significative time. It has been straight to deletion point.
Some pages that survived the deletion (e.g. TPRF) had the « missing sources » tag set since 15 years… What, I have to admit, can justify some action. But it was not the case for the PerlMonks and Perl Mongers pages: those just got deleted on an extremely short notice, making it impossible for the community to attempt any improvement.
I makes very hard to re-start a new article. Why start from scratch when we could re-use and improve the old article? This is discouraging.
I am moderately tech-savvy and had a WikiPedia account for years. But going into the deletion-review process WikiPedia bureaucracy is a lot of work. Pretty honestly I looked at the process and it looks so complicated that I think I would rather write a brand new article.
This « rule » is infuriating. Google searches are tailored to serve us content that might interest us. In this case, Google search first page returns plenty of notable results for me. Might not be the case for a person interested in geology and dogs, though.
How could such a biased thing be a valid WikiPedia criteria?
What about maintaining the codebases that got written 25 years ago? Those still exist and needs care to stay operational. Sometimes there’s no point rewriting to the next trendy language, although it can be obligatory, if it’s impossible for the company to find skilled workers, because everybody moved to a different language ecosystem.