How do you find hiring? A Blekko founder said they chose Perl partly because as one of the few hot startups to be using Perl, it would make them a top choice for great Perl hackers.
I've heard this argument before: I'll build my product using X because nobody else is doing it, so all the best Xers are going to line up. I can't speak for the author, but I haven't seen it quite work out.
Unless you're talking exclusively to language/stack zealots, the best guys are evolving the tools, and the next-best are evolving with them. That's not to say that all things old are bad and all things new are good, but we do tend to get better at different classes of problems.
As the author suggests, though, Perl has this incredible longevity and extensibility. I really like it whenever I work with it, and it wouldn't be a turn-off if I was considering working there. But if someone came to me and said, "I want you to develop a To-Do web app in C++," I'd probably pass.
In all fairness, I think it depends on what "X" is in your case. If you've decided on Prolog as your language of choice, you are going to be limited to a pool of government type candidates and IBM event management gurus.
Perl was one of the first mainstream advanced scripting languages to run the Web, so the amount of folks out there that cut their teeth on CGI/Perl is pretty wide and deep.
For me, I started writing my first Web apps in Perl, and moved over to PHP.
I personally wouldn't work for a company ONLY because of the programming language. I have to be super passionate about their product as well and then the language choice comes after.
So far hiring hasn't been a problem for us. However, we don't focus on hiring Perl hackers, but outstanding hackers instead. They grow to enjoy Perl after a few hours and sometimes during the interview ;) haha
That's funny, because most of the "hot" startups are choosing/using languages that they can actually find developers for. If great Perl hackers were easy to find, more startups would use Perl.
That's a chicken and egg problem though, especially in a place as driven by fashion as the technology startup scene in Silicon Valley. Training a decent developer to be effective with Perl is fairly easy (use my free book on the subject!).
Getting attention because you didn't use Node or Clojure or Erlang or Ruby or Python or Java is trickier.
(I've been at this long enough to remember hearing from VCs "Your product has a Perl backend and a Python frontend? Oh... would you consider rewriting it all in Java? Java has more buzz.")
