Go vs Perl: Which Rising Programming Language Will Earn You a 6-Figure Job?

Go and Perl are popular programming languages but which one will help you land a 6-figure job?

The popularity of programming languages depends a lot on trends and how effective they are for developers. The easier it is for the programmers, the more popular and widely accepted the languages will be. There have been many instances where even after a grand introduction some languages do not meet the expectations of the developers to the fullest. Programming languages like Go and Perl are making a name in the world but when it comes to Go vs Perl, which programming language will earn you a 6-figure job?

Go vs Perl: What are the differences?

What is Go?

An open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software. Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

Salary of Golang professionals

Learning Golang or Go Programming language can boost your career and also help you to get a job at Google, which is the dream of many software developers. The average Golang developer salary in the USA is US$135,143 per year or US$69.30 per hour. Entry-level positions start at US$120,000 per year while most experienced workers make up to US$170,000 per year. In India, a Golang developer's salary ranges from ₹ 3.3 Lakhs to ₹ 23.4 Lakhs with an average annual salary of ₹ 9.0 Lakhs. Additional pay could include cash bonuses, commission, tips, and profit-sharing.

Go usage continues to grow, and with it the demand for Go programmers. And according to some experts, soon Go will supplant Java as the language of choice for the enterprise, and the demand for Golang developers will also increase, especially those who really understand things like interfaces and don't impose "patterns" from other programming languages.

The static binary story is very refreshing, considering the previous decade's focus on managed runtimes and dynamic languages, both of which have a complex and unwieldy distribution story. This appears to be very attractive to system administrators and others who identify with the 'DevOps' moniker.

What is Perl?

Perl is a programming language that's been on and off its deathbed for years now. Work on Perl 6 started in 2000 and was in development for 15 years, finally being released in December 2015. During this time, many named Perl among the other dead programming languages that had fallen out of favor. The release of Perl 6 did revive the language somewhat, but it's far less mainstream than it once was. Highly capable, feature-rich programming language with over 26 years of development. Perl is a general-purpose programming language originally developed for text manipulation and now used for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming, GUI development, and more.

Relevance depends upon context. Perl is still used, which makes it relevant if it is used where you currently (or plan to) work. Perl's popularity has dropped dramatically compared to the beginning of this century, when it was still a core web technology and the automation language of choice on UNIX/Linux; hence it has lost ground to other languages (Python, PHP, Ruby, even Go) in areas where it used to dominate. It is rare, now, to see new projects chosen by Perl. So the likelihood of Perl being relevant to you has shrunk.