It's hard to find good Perl developers and even harder to run multi-language libraries for the same online portal (ie same site, domain, database, hosting environment: hardware, OSs....and so on).
I disagree. First, it's hard to find good developers, period. S
econd, in general, good developers are hard to find by design (e.g., to avoid recruiters, but also because they are most tof the time already doing interesting work).
Lastly, yes, it's hard to find good Perl programmers to do boring work, under boring conditions, at a boring wage. But then that's true of all good developers. Try to find a Rails programmer to remediate crappy code (I've tried).
You're missing my point, PHP developers that know how to build websites are available ten to the dozen. But Perl most of the Perl developers we've tried to recruit over the last 18 months are either completely clueless at writing RESTful APIs or just terrible developers (sometimes even both).
We've had far more success at hiring good PHP developers and teaching them Perl then we have had at finding the Perl developers that can write web technologies.
But this might just be a facet of our location (a suburb that's more than an hour away from any city), so all the developers of "niche" languages (such as Perl has sadly become) tend to get drawn to the city and higher wages. Where as those who are still good developers but not as money driven tend to pick the more popular languages because they'll pick the work in the area they want to work. (that's probably an unfair generalization statement, but it's true for the local area where I live).
