At this point in Perl's history, there is no such thing as a mid-level Perl developer.
I'm actually a Los Angeles Perl developer and I keep telling my HR department to either look for college kids with basically no professional programming experience at all, or senior candidates that they're willing to pay at least $90,000. Looking for "some Perl programmer guy" with some experience that you're looking to pay $70,000 is pointless, because they don't exist.
Perl's lack of a "sexy web startup framework" (e.g. Rails) essentially wiped out a whole "generation" of developers. I'll be the first to admit it's a lot harder to bang out your brilliant "It's like Facebook... but for cats!" startup idea in Perl and its respective frameworks. If you want a decent foundation, you'll use something like Rails or Django. If you just want to bang it out, you'll just inline some crappy PHP code in your HTML. Eventually your company will grow, you'll have different kinds of problems to worry about, like, "this third-party partner doesn't have an API so I need to write a spider that logs into their UI and scrapes the data we need" or "I need to parse this DB log to figure out the frequency of SELECT queries," but since 97% of startups[1] don't ever get to that point, Perl didn't get a lot of love in 2005-2007. After all, we're on Hacker News, not Mid-Sized Company News.
So if you were a Perl hacker in 2004, 2005, you either loved the flexibility and "whipitupitude" Perl gave you for your back-end operations, and now it's 5 years later and you're a senior engineer looking for a commensurate salary. Or you decided to crank out CatBook in RoR until Zuckerberg sued you into oblivion and then you just got another Ruby job afterwards.
For what it's worth, I would encourage the HR departments that Randall mentions to look at new college grads. More than any other language, I feel it's one of the easiest languages to learn regardless of your previous experience, mainly because of TMTOWTDI[2] you can write it in whatever syntax format you're already experienced in. I see a lot of college kids who came from Java and at first their code is full of HammerFactorySchematicFactorySchematicFactories, and while it's pretty silly, it'll work until they learn better, and in three months they're essentially as productive as the theoretical mid-level Perl programmer anyway.
People wildly overestimate the intelligence it takes to hack the average scripty software job anyway. It took me about two months to go from complete ignorance of perl, http and unix to productivity at a startup and I'm certainly not exceptional. Hire smart people and give them a little ramp time.
> I'm actually a Los Angeles Perl developer and I keep telling my HR department to either look for college kids with basically no professional programming experience at all, or senior candidates that they're willing to pay at least $90,000. Looking for "some Perl programmer guy" with some experience that you're looking to pay $70,000 is pointless, because they don't exist.
Actually, if I found myself looking for a job I'd consider taking $70k, even though I'm a senior level guy and that would be quite a pay cut from what I now get. The big factors would be the stability of the company, how good its benefits are (including 401k matching), and reasonable flexibility in work hours.
The reason for this is that I'm 50, and I'd want the job to be my last job before retirement. If a job has a very good chance of being able to take me to retirement age, and letting me grow my 401k a good amount, that would be more attractive to me than a job that pays more now, but that I can't foresee lasting 12-17 years.
There are two questions here: What's the situation with LA and What's the situation with Perl.
It's challenging to get people to move to LA. People who like LA are in LA. People outside of LA have a hard time seeing its charms given the lack of transportation structure other than giant freeway traffic jams and busses that come a few times a day and can take a half day to travel a few miles. The cost of living in a decent neighborhood is very high, yet most positions offer mid west style salary. Most developers will take a huge hit to their standard of living by accepting an LA job, so LA employers mostly try to recruit locally and even when they do recruit from out of town, few are willing to attend to basic hygiene issues such as paying for relocation costs.
On the Perl issue, I use Perl for a lot of things because it is very fast to code in and to execute. I find both C and assembler easier to understand than trying to read a complex regular expression in perl or decipher data structures in perl that use pointers due to a syntax that is still unintuitive after a decade of use. Regular expressions probably can't be simplified since they are their own very dense language, but the pointer syntax could be improved a lot. Perl code that creates classes and objects is quite hard.
Coding in Perl can be a challenge and Perl is so large that all of us are expert at different things which means that almost every single piece of new perl code I see is like having to learn a new language.
I have just "dealt with it" all this time, but it's possible, given this post about LA, that fewer developers are willing to deal with the overhead of learning Perl given that for simple sites PHP can be more efficient for them, and for system scripts things like python have gotten more traction.
Pointer Syntax? What? I'm not trying to be an ass here, but I'm confused as how you could have a decade of Perl use up your sleeve and not realise Perl has no pointers. It has references, perhaps, and perhaps I'm just being a semantic pedant, but they're quite different to me.
Then again, I actually find C/C++ pointer tracking and memory allocation daunting, so perhaps that is why I find Perl references more intuitive than not?
In my estimation you can make Perl harder to work with if you try, but you can also make it easier. ie: regular expressions are easier to work with if you use the /x modifier so you can whitespace fill it and document the regex itself, you can do things the hard way with objects, or you can use something like CPAN and get a module that makes this easy ( Moose is my favourite ).
Sure, Perl is perhaps hard for people, I'll give you that, but it doesn't have to be.
As someone who hires in LA, and moved to LA to take a job here, your perception is either outdated or simply incorrect. There are a good number of shops here in LA, including Google, Amazon, Hulu, Sony and Yahoo that pay well above the median for good talent. A good dev or PM is going to make as much here as in New York, Seattle or San Francisco, although admittedly there are fewer positions overall than those cities. Additionally, most if not all of those major tech employers regularly pay relocation costs to move people here from other tech centers - it's just not practical to run a dev team here and not do it, given the smaller number of engineering grads.
Additionally, while having a car is a requirement (as it is in all but a handful of US cities), cost of living is lower than in New York or SF, which are the two most likely alternatives. Rent is lower (my rent here is half of what it would be in those cities) and most of your weekend activities are either free (beach, mountains, etc) or cheaper than SF or NY. And there's more of them too: there aren't many places in the US where you can ski on Saturday and go play volleyball on the beach on Sunday, which is why much of our team are Seattle or San Fran weather refugees.
As for Perl, I'd argue that because the tech / web media industry here in LA is newer, there aren't as many folks around who date back to the years when Perl was the dominant platform. When I started developing for the web, it was one of the few practical options; now I'm sure I'd be starting with Ruby or Python. What we do is hire engineers who are smart enough to work in any language, and then let them pick up a book and learn Perl, rather than filter first for that specific language.
Early in the year I was job hunting. I live half-way between SF and LA (no jobs near home), so I was looking for jobs in both places and have worked in both. First there were way fewer jobs in LA than in The Bay Area, maybe a factor five. The jobs in LA in general were far less interesting, a lot using the MS stack. The pay was considerably lower by 10 to 30%, often in the 50K range which doesnt come close to paying the mortgage, let alone food and gas.
or decipher data structures in perl that use pointers
due to a syntax that is still unintuitive after a
decade of use
Hint: Perl doesn't have pointers, it has references. It's odd that you haven't gotten used to it after 10 years.
Perl code that creates classes and objects is quite
hard.
Not with Moose. Simply declarative OO that contains an MOP and is very extensible.
Coding in Perl can be a challenge and Perl is so large
that all of us are expert at different things which
means that almost every single piece of new perl code I
see is like having to learn a new language.
This always surprises me. I code Perl for a living, and I never have this problem. I never run into code I don't understand. Sometimes the formatting and I need half a second to locate the curly brackets because the original author was a C/C++ guy, but that's about it.
Although I'm a Perl zealot, I must admit that the thought of trying to understand someone ELSE's Perl code is horrifying. This is because although everyone writes beautiful maintainable Perl code, everyone else's Perl code is horrific.
On another note, what are the chances that this thread is going to turn into a PedantoNerd flamewar.
although everyone writes beautiful maintainable Perl code, everyone else's Perl code is horrific.
I do not buy this. I've maintained plenty of good Perl written by plenty of other programmers. I've seen bad Perl as well, but I've generally believed that the same developers would have produced bad code in other languages. I believe that the experienced developers I've worked with would generally say the same. From what they've said, they've categorized more of mine on the good side than the bad.
I admit that there are occasionally cases where very good code is very difficult to read. Those cases are very rare, but not entirely non-existent. On those occasions I've been glad that Perl gave me the rope to hang myself. However if you find yourself in this position on a routine basis, you should ask what you are doing wrong. Because that shouldn't happen. Really.
(Note, I'm not a Perl developer at the moment, but I was for 11 years. I've never considered myself a Perl zealot.)
I graded assignments in a class that used Perl. Absolute nightmare. By the time I got to the end of the stack each week I couldn't tell the difference between brilliance and stupidity.
But really, I think you hit it right - because the language displays such a lack of orthogonality, ten perl coders will write the same line of code ten different ways, and everyone will favor his own constructs.
Something is wrong here. You're a "zealot" but "the thought of trying to understand someone else's Perl code is horrifying"? As a Perl developer, I read other peoples code without a problem on a day to day basis.
Maybe the positions and/or compensation aren't competitive?
Perl doesn't attract brand new programmers very much these days. The result is that the people using Perl now tend to be more experienced and thus in a position to be somewhat picky.
I was a Perl programmer in L.A. around 1999-2000. I've since moved on to Ruby, which I prefer in just about every respect, and San Francisco, which is kind of a wash. Perl's not a bad language but at this point Python or Ruby just seem like a better long-term investment.
In general, economics tells us that if a commodity is not being sold, its price point is incorrect. An unfilled job is a job that is being priced too low.
IMDb.com (a subsidiary of Amazon.com) has an office in Sherman Oaks and we are definitely looking for experienced Perl developers. If you are interested please send us an email at [email protected]
I'm a perl hacker from way back. I put a few things in CPAN back in my day. But honestly I've not written perl in a decade, so when I got a really amazing job offer for a position doing Perl, I gave it some thought.
Perl is not only not the sexiest/hottest language, but watching and waiting for Perl6 and getting the OO model cleaned up is like waiting for "Duke Nukem Forever". So do you really want to ride on that train? Do you think it will look good on your resume, improve your skill set, or help you think in new and better ways? For all practical purposes the language is dead (FINE, a perl6 implementation is out, but still if the growth is that slow it IS all but dead).
I get offers pretty much constantly to do work in Python, Ruby, and even Java. It would take a lot to make me want to backtrack to an environment that wouldn't help me to grow and evolve as a developer. So the answer for me was "No thanks, thats not really what I want to be doing".
but watching and waiting for Perl6 and getting the OO
model cleaned up
Have a look at http://search.cpan.org/dist/Moose and http://moose.perl.org as well as the MooseX::* namespace on CPAN. It's Perl 5 OO with a Meta Object Protocol, lots of extensions, and compatibility with pure Perl 5 OO.
Do you think it will look good on your resume, improve
your skill set, or help you think in new and better
ways?
For me it does. I'm a full-time Perl 5 developer and I have to learn and read up on newer technologies all the time. Even if the CPAN already provides me with what I mostly need, I'll still have to integrate it into the customers infrastructure. And for that I have to understand it.
I doubt Perl is getting as much new blood as they used to be, because a disproportionate amount of it is going to newer or sexier languages, like Python, Ruby, etc. Languages that fit approximately the same niches and have approximately the same level of agility or terseness. (Note I said approximately for you precision nigglers out there.)
I have to wonder how they are recruiting, because I don't see that many available positions on the job boards.
I'm a Perl developer with 11 years experience who's been watching the job boards with the intent to relocate to a new city soon (I'm looking all over the US) but I'm not seeing that many Perl jobs anywhere. PHP, Python and Ruby look like a much hotter skills right now based on my unscientific observation.
Another thought is that like me, other Perl developers are worried about getting stuck in a shrinking specialty and are actively seeking non-perl jobs to strengthen their career. That said, I'm still open to perl and willing to relocate so if your company needs an experienced Perl guy you can find my email address in my HN profile.
Is this a problem in the Boston area also? I hope not because I've been doing Perl a long time and would consider taking a Perl job around here, but either its not the case or they are hiding them from me, even though I write the loveliest Perl ever, I swear!
Athenahealth uses mainly Perl, but I got the impression they're mostly hiring new graduates and training them up. When I interviewed, they didn't advertise using Perl at all, maybe to not scare people off.
I had to leave LA last year because I couldn't find work, and now I'm in the Bay Area. Maybe all the perl hackers moved away? I wasn't seeing many Linux jobs in general.
There are lots and lots of jobs – but of course - like everywhere - most people are recruited/hired from "know someone who know someone", so making contacts as you work is crucial.
Well, as a 24 year old PERL developer in Los Angeles I'm glad this is the case.
Many people underestimate the capabilities of the PERL MVC frameworks such as CGI::Application + Moose and the other ones.
I can bang out a proper MVC templated project with a proper OO structure and Beanstalk MQ backend for long running jobs with an AJAX interface that'll scale in about week. No sweat.
These tools make the recent Diaspora fiasco non-existant. They take of sanity checking, access checking, etc. at a lower level and you implement features in higher level classes.
(For example I can store JSON in a DB column and automatically parse it when it's accesed like:
$mytable->myjson->{'myvalue'} )
Need a barcode reader? Need a SOAP/JSON/etc library? Need clean database access API? Need a printing library? Need a PSD library? All in CPAN.
I wouldn't touch Rails with a 10 foot pole. PHP blows chunks. I'm able to be picky when it comes to jobs
I've gotten my PERL jobs through craigslist. I'm honestly not aware of a better medium to find PERL jobs.
Been programming in PERL since I was 14 (so 10 years) and I'm so happy I don't have to sweat for a job. I'm actually currently living off my previous job's savings because it paid that well.
Also note that I never even finished High School.
In short, I don't know why they haven't been able to find PERL programmers. I guess because the newer generation of developers don't realize how awesome it is.
Protip: you'll get more people interested in you if you spell it Perl instead of PERL. Despite appearances, 'Perl' is not an acronym, there are backronyms for it, but that doesn't mean its an acronym.
I say this only because you give the illusion of knowing something about what you are talking about, and its merely sad to me that you can use Perl for 10 years and never learn this.
( And sadly, not knowing Perl is not an acronym looks bad to people who know different, and thus instantly assume you're not very experienced in Perl )
Tip for you. The language is named Perl. And a lot of people use it as a quick filter to tell whether someone has actually encountered the Perl community.
But how are you going to get new Perl jobs on CraigsList now that they've banned the dirty sections? Sorry ... left Perl for Python in the late '90s. Clean syntax and Zope and Plone for frameworks even then!
You wanna know the exact reason that Perl is dead? It all boils down to PHP had informative and pretty inline debug statements when doing web programming, and Perl did not. So Perl lost, and now everyone codes in PHP.
[+] [-] nhashem|15 years ago|reply
I'm actually a Los Angeles Perl developer and I keep telling my HR department to either look for college kids with basically no professional programming experience at all, or senior candidates that they're willing to pay at least $90,000. Looking for "some Perl programmer guy" with some experience that you're looking to pay $70,000 is pointless, because they don't exist.
Perl's lack of a "sexy web startup framework" (e.g. Rails) essentially wiped out a whole "generation" of developers. I'll be the first to admit it's a lot harder to bang out your brilliant "It's like Facebook... but for cats!" startup idea in Perl and its respective frameworks. If you want a decent foundation, you'll use something like Rails or Django. If you just want to bang it out, you'll just inline some crappy PHP code in your HTML. Eventually your company will grow, you'll have different kinds of problems to worry about, like, "this third-party partner doesn't have an API so I need to write a spider that logs into their UI and scrapes the data we need" or "I need to parse this DB log to figure out the frequency of SELECT queries," but since 97% of startups[1] don't ever get to that point, Perl didn't get a lot of love in 2005-2007. After all, we're on Hacker News, not Mid-Sized Company News.
So if you were a Perl hacker in 2004, 2005, you either loved the flexibility and "whipitupitude" Perl gave you for your back-end operations, and now it's 5 years later and you're a senior engineer looking for a commensurate salary. Or you decided to crank out CatBook in RoR until Zuckerberg sued you into oblivion and then you just got another Ruby job afterwards.
For what it's worth, I would encourage the HR departments that Randall mentions to look at new college grads. More than any other language, I feel it's one of the easiest languages to learn regardless of your previous experience, mainly because of TMTOWTDI[2] you can write it in whatever syntax format you're already experienced in. I see a lot of college kids who came from Java and at first their code is full of HammerFactorySchematicFactorySchematicFactories, and while it's pretty silly, it'll work until they learn better, and in three months they're essentially as productive as the theoretical mid-level Perl programmer anyway.
[1] This statistic is POOMA[3].
[2] There's More Than One Way To Do It
[3] Pulled Out Of My Ass
[+] [-] cageface|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|15 years ago|reply
Actually, if I found myself looking for a job I'd consider taking $70k, even though I'm a senior level guy and that would be quite a pay cut from what I now get. The big factors would be the stability of the company, how good its benefits are (including 401k matching), and reasonable flexibility in work hours.
The reason for this is that I'm 50, and I'd want the job to be my last job before retirement. If a job has a very good chance of being able to take me to retirement age, and letting me grow my 401k a good amount, that would be more attractive to me than a job that pays more now, but that I can't foresee lasting 12-17 years.
[+] [-] bugsy|15 years ago|reply
It's challenging to get people to move to LA. People who like LA are in LA. People outside of LA have a hard time seeing its charms given the lack of transportation structure other than giant freeway traffic jams and busses that come a few times a day and can take a half day to travel a few miles. The cost of living in a decent neighborhood is very high, yet most positions offer mid west style salary. Most developers will take a huge hit to their standard of living by accepting an LA job, so LA employers mostly try to recruit locally and even when they do recruit from out of town, few are willing to attend to basic hygiene issues such as paying for relocation costs.
On the Perl issue, I use Perl for a lot of things because it is very fast to code in and to execute. I find both C and assembler easier to understand than trying to read a complex regular expression in perl or decipher data structures in perl that use pointers due to a syntax that is still unintuitive after a decade of use. Regular expressions probably can't be simplified since they are their own very dense language, but the pointer syntax could be improved a lot. Perl code that creates classes and objects is quite hard.
Coding in Perl can be a challenge and Perl is so large that all of us are expert at different things which means that almost every single piece of new perl code I see is like having to learn a new language.
I have just "dealt with it" all this time, but it's possible, given this post about LA, that fewer developers are willing to deal with the overhead of learning Perl given that for simple sites PHP can be more efficient for them, and for system scripts things like python have gotten more traction.
[+] [-] kentnl|15 years ago|reply
Then again, I actually find C/C++ pointer tracking and memory allocation daunting, so perhaps that is why I find Perl references more intuitive than not?
In my estimation you can make Perl harder to work with if you try, but you can also make it easier. ie: regular expressions are easier to work with if you use the /x modifier so you can whitespace fill it and document the regex itself, you can do things the hard way with objects, or you can use something like CPAN and get a module that makes this easy ( Moose is my favourite ).
Sure, Perl is perhaps hard for people, I'll give you that, but it doesn't have to be.
[+] [-] tomkarlo|15 years ago|reply
Additionally, while having a car is a requirement (as it is in all but a handful of US cities), cost of living is lower than in New York or SF, which are the two most likely alternatives. Rent is lower (my rent here is half of what it would be in those cities) and most of your weekend activities are either free (beach, mountains, etc) or cheaper than SF or NY. And there's more of them too: there aren't many places in the US where you can ski on Saturday and go play volleyball on the beach on Sunday, which is why much of our team are Seattle or San Fran weather refugees.
As for Perl, I'd argue that because the tech / web media industry here in LA is newer, there aren't as many folks around who date back to the years when Perl was the dominant platform. When I started developing for the web, it was one of the few practical options; now I'm sure I'd be starting with Ruby or Python. What we do is hire engineers who are smart enough to work in any language, and then let them pick up a book and learn Perl, rather than filter first for that specific language.
[+] [-] russell|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phaylon|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mayank|15 years ago|reply
On another note, what are the chances that this thread is going to turn into a PedantoNerd flamewar.
[+] [-] btilly|15 years ago|reply
I do not buy this. I've maintained plenty of good Perl written by plenty of other programmers. I've seen bad Perl as well, but I've generally believed that the same developers would have produced bad code in other languages. I believe that the experienced developers I've worked with would generally say the same. From what they've said, they've categorized more of mine on the good side than the bad.
I admit that there are occasionally cases where very good code is very difficult to read. Those cases are very rare, but not entirely non-existent. On those occasions I've been glad that Perl gave me the rope to hang myself. However if you find yourself in this position on a routine basis, you should ask what you are doing wrong. Because that shouldn't happen. Really.
(Note, I'm not a Perl developer at the moment, but I was for 11 years. I've never considered myself a Perl zealot.)
[+] [-] ahi|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] presidentender|15 years ago|reply
But really, I think you hit it right - because the language displays such a lack of orthogonality, ten perl coders will write the same line of code ten different ways, and everyone will favor his own constructs.
[+] [-] phaylon|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staunch|15 years ago|reply
Perl doesn't attract brand new programmers very much these days. The result is that the people using Perl now tend to be more experienced and thus in a position to be somewhat picky.
[+] [-] jbarham|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbarham|15 years ago|reply
As with any situation where people have a choice, they will take the option that is most attractive to them.
[+] [-] JoelPM|15 years ago|reply
(which I'd certainly agree with)
[+] [-] cageface|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vivtek|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] whitcot|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] longlistener|15 years ago|reply
Perl is not only not the sexiest/hottest language, but watching and waiting for Perl6 and getting the OO model cleaned up is like waiting for "Duke Nukem Forever". So do you really want to ride on that train? Do you think it will look good on your resume, improve your skill set, or help you think in new and better ways? For all practical purposes the language is dead (FINE, a perl6 implementation is out, but still if the growth is that slow it IS all but dead).
I get offers pretty much constantly to do work in Python, Ruby, and even Java. It would take a lot to make me want to backtrack to an environment that wouldn't help me to grow and evolve as a developer. So the answer for me was "No thanks, thats not really what I want to be doing".
[+] [-] phaylon|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkramlich|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyre|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zerohp|15 years ago|reply
I'm a Perl developer with 11 years experience who's been watching the job boards with the intent to relocate to a new city soon (I'm looking all over the US) but I'm not seeing that many Perl jobs anywhere. PHP, Python and Ruby look like a much hotter skills right now based on my unscientific observation.
Another thought is that like me, other Perl developers are worried about getting stuck in a shrinking specialty and are actively seeking non-perl jobs to strengthen their career. That said, I'm still open to perl and willing to relocate so if your company needs an experienced Perl guy you can find my email address in my HN profile.
[+] [-] askbjoernhansen|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KevinMS|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cdr|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tedreed|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] askbjoernhansen|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revoltingx|15 years ago|reply
Many people underestimate the capabilities of the PERL MVC frameworks such as CGI::Application + Moose and the other ones.
I can bang out a proper MVC templated project with a proper OO structure and Beanstalk MQ backend for long running jobs with an AJAX interface that'll scale in about week. No sweat.
These tools make the recent Diaspora fiasco non-existant. They take of sanity checking, access checking, etc. at a lower level and you implement features in higher level classes. (For example I can store JSON in a DB column and automatically parse it when it's accesed like: $mytable->myjson->{'myvalue'} )
Need a barcode reader? Need a SOAP/JSON/etc library? Need clean database access API? Need a printing library? Need a PSD library? All in CPAN.
I wouldn't touch Rails with a 10 foot pole. PHP blows chunks. I'm able to be picky when it comes to jobs
I've gotten my PERL jobs through craigslist. I'm honestly not aware of a better medium to find PERL jobs. Been programming in PERL since I was 14 (so 10 years) and I'm so happy I don't have to sweat for a job. I'm actually currently living off my previous job's savings because it paid that well.
Also note that I never even finished High School.
In short, I don't know why they haven't been able to find PERL programmers. I guess because the newer generation of developers don't realize how awesome it is.
PS: Looking for a short-term PERL project in Los Angeles, check out my resume: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/therevoltingx
[+] [-] kentnl|15 years ago|reply
I say this only because you give the illusion of knowing something about what you are talking about, and its merely sad to me that you can use Perl for 10 years and never learn this.
( And sadly, not knowing Perl is not an acronym looks bad to people who know different, and thus instantly assume you're not very experienced in Perl )
[+] [-] btilly|15 years ago|reply
Check out perlfaq1 if you doubt me.
[+] [-] smoyer|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dstein|15 years ago|reply