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how can we strategically pull the PERL language into the browser?

The Perl Foundation has funded a grant to extend Rakudo, the preeminent Perl6 compiler, so that it can generate JavaScript.
  http://news.perlfoundation.org/2016/02/ian-hague-perl-6-grant-applica.html

You can see the repo for the work here: https://github.com/pmurias/rakudo-js

and read updates from the developer's blog here: http://blogs.perl.org/users/pawel_murias/

Yeah, that's my excuse, as a freelance Perl programmer. Still, each time I check Fund Drive Details I cry a little. Is that all some of the companies that nearly run on Perl can do? The last time this amount was donated, if I recall correctly, was a few years (!) ago by a Dutch company (not 100% sure if it was Dutch).

Anyway, a big thanks to Craigslist. But there are plenty of companies out there that could follow. If you donate over 5K you get a nice mention on the Sponsors page. Peanuts for some, I would say.

After all, C++0x has only taken, what, 4 years? Perl 6 has been brewing since July, 2000. (Maybe by Christmas?)

Perl has had one of the best package management systems of any language or operating system for nearly as long as Linux has even been around.

CPAN has had its problems, but it's been reliable for me (after learning its quirks). Even so, XS components which rely on shared libraries have added complexity to the distribution dependency resolution, configuration, and installation processes. Recent developments have improved this, but better integration with package managers can only help.

I did forget to mention BSDPAN (and a grant proposal to extend the reach of BSDPAN).

'The other question is that there are no implementations of the standard yet...'

The Rakudo guys have now committed themselves to a useful/usable release (if not a complete implementation of everything in the standard) in Spring 2010 (the target is April):

http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/39411

They intend this to be a release which 'application writers will feel comfortable enough to start using in their projects'.

This probably helped:

http://news.perlfoundation.org/2008/05/tpf_receives_large_donation_in.html

Here's where they are now:

http://rakudo.org/status

http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/master/docs/ROADMAP

"For software of any appreciable size, Perl has unfortunately died in industry. People just aren't using it for anything more than 10-line throwaway scripts"

"Large and high profile websites using Perl include: Slashdot, The Internet Movie Database, Amazon.com, CMPnet technical magazines ...

The Perl Foundation was accepted as an organization in Google Summer of Code 2009! I am excited to be the organization administrator.

Students interested in learning more about applying for GSoC2009 with TPF can join the mailing list and read up on The Perl Foundation wiki . For breaking news you can follow me at @dukeleto or join us on IRC on #soc-help on irc.perl.org .

Parrot Foundation is within the umbrella of The Perl Foundation this year, so if you want to work on the hottest virtual machine that just hit 1.0.0, then you are in the right place.

Remember, student applications are due at ~Noon PDT April 3rd 2009. That is surprisingly soon.

Hope to see lots of great applications coming down the pipe!

The Perl Foundation was accepted as an organization in Google Summer of Code 2009! I am excited to be the organization administrator.

Students interested in learning more about applying for GSoC2009 with TPF can join the mailing list and read up on The Perl Foundation wiki . For breaking news you can follow me at @dukeleto or join us on IRC on #soc-help on irc.perl.org .

Parrot Foundation is within the umbrella of The Perl Foundation this year, so if you want to work on the hottest virtual machine that just hit 1.0.0, then you are in the right place.

Remember, student applications are due at ~Noon PDT April 3rd 2009. That is surprisingly soon.

Hope to see lots of great applications coming down the pipe!

I received a Perl Foundation grant in 2007 -- $2000 for about 80 hours of work. That's not a very good rate for an experienced engineer in the USA, but for me the money was not just a carrot but also a stick. I knew that failing my project would be a very public humiliation. It was work I wanted to do anyway, but I had procrastinated it in my free time. The deadline and publicity made me finish it. So, IMO it's the acceptance of the grant that's a significant source of motivation, not the completion.

If it wasn't for the money, I may have been just another open source programmer who didn't finish just another open source project.

Passing tests is something, but does not in itself equate to completeness.

Look at http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?development_dashboard that seems to have some goals. But still "Language Definition" is on the todo list. And "Language Definition" seems a pretty big item to me, as changes in that can change the tests. Not only that, would you write a bunch of code in a language knowing that at any moment it could be invalidated by a few small tweaks? I wouldn't, not production code at least.

They have some other things like the command line (deciding what it is, then implementing it), deciding what the installation package is, etc.. But still until the language design is frozen, you will never be done. And if a major change is made that results totally rebuilding the architecture you could end up throwing a lot of work away.

This todo list seems more like a brainstorm. Really what is needed is someone like Larry Wall to finish his documentation, then someone to write tests based on the Perl 6 language design (In Perl 6) and then passing those tests can become a chart to Perl 6. Although there will still be issues such as installation package, converting modules in CPAN and getting it working with Perl6, etc... But the most important thing is to get the language down. Then people will start playing with it to get a jump on learning Perl 6. And once the language is finalized it can start to be used in some corporate settings as a piece of beta software.

Most likely the real Perl 6 revolution won't come until CPAN (or some other entity like it) is made for Perl 6 and has some of the more useful modules (like DBI among others). Right now a large part of Perl's value is CPAN and the various modules available. That is another project that cannot even really fully start until after the language is finalized.

perl6 is done

you can test it by compiling parrotvm with perl6 support

make perl6

http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?rakudo

and the perl6 binary is there and you can start porting perl5 to perl6 scripts

or you can test as example an wiki engine written in pure per6
http://viklund.pp.se/november.pdf

Absolutely, and this is why there's one of freenode's biggest IRC channels, a pair of mailing lists with thousands of subscribers, and the Hackage library/tool repository just waiting to help you solve your real world problem. Be it Compiler building, version control, writing interpretters for popular imperrative languages, Writing 3D shooters, or a whole host of other tasks.

Perl 6 has made huge strides since 2000. The question is whether progress of the project will ever catch up with the goal posts.

Umm... the goalposts are set. The language spec is done.

So did it get completed between the time you last posted and it was "largely" done, and now? Congratulations!

The test suite is being built. All that's left is to implement it, and that's being done as we speak. What else do you want?

I don't want "being done". I want "done".

After eight years, the best you can say about the language specification is that it's "largely" complete?

Last I checked, the C language spec was still being worked on.

The THIRD iteration, after the first two iterations were DONE, FINAL, and widely implemented.

There's a difference between regular iterations and continuous tinkering.

And yet, C compilers abound.

C compilers implementing C89 or C99, the COMPLETED iterations.

As I understand it, there are a few places where work is still being done, but implementations can, and are, building on the existing spec, because it's *finished*.

You keep contradicting yourself. Are you sure you know what "finished" means? To the best of my knowledge, there isn't even a complete DRAFT available to the public. In what appears to be the most authoritative list, about half the chapters have not even been published as a draft, and about half of the rest are still marked as "DRAFT", so presumably not final.

Besides, you took one small quote and asked "is that best best you can say?".

I'm quite serious. Ada, which was a huge effort and must have been bogged down in enormous amounts of red tape (with both the DoD and a standards organization involved), went from CFP to published standard in 6 years. Perl 6 does not have a complete draft after 8 years.

Funny how you completely ignored the rest, such as the test suite,

I'll grant that this is a good thing to have.

and the two ongoing implementations.

I'd gladly settle for ONE, FINISHED, USABLE implementation.

As interesting as having Perl 6 implementation in Haskell is from an academic point of view, it's about the least likely practical deployment platoform I can think of.

Perl 6 keeps siphoning off mindshare and developers.

Uhh... okay. I can't say I've seen that, but if you say it's true, I guess it must be...

One of the concrete ways this manifests is in the funding of Perl 5 and Perl 6. According to the published records, the Perl Foundation awarded at least $200K in grants for Perl 6 development during 2000-2006. While the Perl 6 project may have attracted some of this funding, and some of the Perl 6 work was backported to Perl 5, I very much doubt that this adds up to being a net benefit for Perl 5.

despite the fact that you contradict yourself in the very same sentence, pointing out, as I already have, that Perl 5 continues to move forward.

Yes, the Perl 6 effort has not killed Perl 5 progress entirely. That does not mean it hasn't hindered it.

Parrot threatened to throw other scripting languages into a similar state of confusion

Because it'll provide a new platform to target, much like the .NET CLR or the JVM?

It's not the "new platform" that is the problem, but the vaporware existence of a platform that after more than 7 years still isn't shipping in stable form. Again, the distinction between stable, shipping products and endlessly evolving projects seems to elude you.

None of this would matter much if Perl 6 and

In the case of Perl (the language) and perl (the language system's implementation), there's The Perl Foundation. They pay bounties, give grants for certain projects, help support sites like Perlmonks and use Perl;, and more.

The tcpdump and libpcap projects are on SourceForge, but they don't have their donations link enabled. The projects' home page isn't coming up for me ATM, so I can't say if they have anything there.

The strace project is also on SourceForge and also does not have their donations enabled. The web page listed for the project is the project's SourceForge page itself, so I don't know where else to look off the top of my head.

[Perl 6 is] Perl 5 trying on Ruby's clothes.

Wow. Don't know much about Perl 6 or Ruby, do you? See The Long Perl 6 Super-Feature List for enlightenment.

Larry & Co are on the right track, and you know it, really.

perl5 is everywhere and perl6 will be a faster, more flexible, powerful and expressive perl than perl5. My guess is that all *NIX systems will have it in their repos within a week after release, CPAN growth will accelerate, n Linux distros will have new system configuration tools written in it for their next release... and biosciences will find the universal cure for cancer X years quicker ;-)

Now if you want to monitor perl6 developments I recommend grabbing the feeds from Planet Perl Six http://planetsix.perl.org/ and check http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi for more info.

Larry has an appealing balance between academic beard striking and pragmatism in his ideas and I am sure we will all benefit from perl6. And yes perl6 will be a wonderful mix of cleaned up oddities, new ideas and stolen concepts...

"All Your Paradigms Are Belong To Us"

Revenues: $66,840,850
Expenses: $19,776,193

"Profit" (or, change in net assets, since it's a non-profit): $27,893,735

According to Mitchell Baker (Mozilla CEO), salaries accounted for 70% of their expenses in 2006, so that's around $14 million. Net assets increased "only" by around $22 million (lower than the $28 million you calculated, perhaps because the Mozilla Corporation has to pay taxes).

Damn, it's good to be free. You'd think that the foundation would donate its money to fund other OSS projects, but as software people have discovered, the first priority of a foundation is to ensure the existence (and a lucrative existence at that) of its staff.

According to the numbers above, Mozilla employees could raise their salaries to 250% of what they now receive and still break even, but they chose not to. They could have made way more money by selling shares in the Mozilla Corp., instead of having it be fully owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, but they didn't.

See this summary of Mozilla grants for 2006. Near the end:

It's too early to tell how much we'll spend in total, but I suspect we'll easily double the amount spent in 2006. As we move into 2008 we'll also be funding projects in more areas.

I get the impression they've gone slow at first to "test the waters" and find the best way to spend their money. They're even looking for help in giving away more:

The other constant is the importance of having people who can help us put together a funding program in particular areas, as Aaron Leventhal has done for Mozilla accessibility. To repeat what I wrote last year:

We're looking for more people like Aaron to whom we can successfully delegate responsibility for suggesting and overseeing grants in their area(s) of expertise. If you're one of those people I'm interested in hearing from you.

They've been funding lots of accessibility work, whereas many for-profits ignore disabled users entirely. They've sponsored conferences on using the internet for the public good. They also sponsor projects that are not part of FF and its revenue stream: work on Linux desktop accessibility, Creative Commons and the Participatory Culture Foundation, buying commercial javascript code and releasing it as open source, Apache and OpenSSL, and just now Perl 6.

Mozilla is working right alongside Opera, Apple, and others to advance web standards in the WHATWG and W3C. Mozilla funds work on web standards (test cases, conformance checkers, etc.), works hard to implement these standards, and even tries to bring useful features of their own platform (such as XBL and the XUL box model) into web standards so the whole web can benefit--even if it means diminishing any comparative advantage of FF over other browsers. Mozilla is working to keep the web platform viable and open in light of competition from Silverlight, Apollo, and others.

Having followed Mozilla very closely for the past several years, I can tell you that these people are not in it for the money; they are religiously devoted to the idea of advancing the Open Web for the pub

Nick Ing-Simmons Dies

For those who are curious, the Perl Foundation had 8 Summer of Code projects funded. They were a blast to work with.

That's a fair question.

In this case, I happen to be "Curtis Poe", a grant manager for The Perl Foundation and in the small world of Perl, I'm moderately well-known. If I were caught making up stories like this, my reputation, and possibly my career, would be ruined.

Also, I hope to post the police report when I get it.

And I've convinced some of my clients that the code I write for them for hire belongs in the CPAN, and that the magazine articles I write for them for hire belongs on the web for free.

It's all a matter of what you negotiate, and finding out what's needed and wanted and doing it. You don't need to charge for the software itself if you can figure out what else they'll need to make the best use of the software.

I don't have code contributions to return to the community, so I give money to the The Perl Foundation". I then get the company to pay for it via our reimbursement system.

Just like the parent said, except not to an opera house.

Donate here or here

Or buy them some music from here where the artist gets 50% of the proceeds. BTW, don't be fooled into thinking that iTunes or whatever gives money to artists. It's just as bad as buying a CD. Unfortunately, there's no way to buy music you hear on popular music stations and actually have a reasonable portion of that music get to the artist </rant>