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For Sale: 1 Damian Conway, 1 Dan Sugalski
Kurt writes "Yet Another Society, through its newly formed Perl Foundation, is launching yet another fund drive to help support the Perl community. This year we will be supporting Damian Conway and Dan Sugalski. Damian will continue to work on a variety of Perl 5 modules and the design of Perl 6. Dan will continue his work on the implementation of Perl 6. More details are available at the Perl Foundation web site. Contributions are tax deductible, so donate today!" Many people will remember when we did this last year. I think it's been a roaring success. So go donate!
Do they cook? Clean?
How much will feeding them / boarding them cost?
Perl? Isn't that the horribly complex programming language that people dread? Why would we want to support that? :)
Seriously, I hope it does well - regardless of your personal coding choices, Perl is used in many places and ought to be supported and improved.
Finally, something to donate to that doesn't involve fat, starving black children in Africa, or barefooted American folks with a dirt floor and a Dodge Viper in their driveway. Hopefully this charity won't fall prey to the usual enemy of charities, greed.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
How much for a PERL necklace?
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
...we've already bought a Damian Conway. We're not interested in whatever cheap imitation you're trying to foist on us.
Liberty uber alles.
For this reason many computer scientist like very lowly of perl, basic or even lisp. But I think this is not right. Such easy to learn languages serve very well to make children interested in computers. This has many good effects.
- Many of these children become addicted to computers and become in later life computer scientists or electrical engineers.
- You have to read a lot when using a computer, so programming languages fight illiteracy.
The best example for this are the slashdot editors who improve their spelling by programming in perl.
- It keeps the children off the street and keeps them from smoking crack or raid candy stores.
- It make people buying computers and help the ruined computer industry.
So donate please all money ! This is all very good.Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I wonder if you could see them on Ebay? Maybe try selling of shares or something like that... probably againt their rules. I bet you'd get lots of visibility that way though.
A few questions:
Are they housetrained? If I buy both of them do I have to keep them in seperate cages or can I let them play together? Is there any sort of special diet I need to be aware of? (I'm not sure if the dollar store is still selling six packs of Jolt and I'm morally against "extreme" doritos)
... with the money they make out of selling Perl books, they could easily fulfil a goodly part of the modest $55000 they talk about on this page. (Yes, I know 55k was the *2001* budget.)
But dunno how much people will be willing to fork out to charity during tough times.. last year this time, things were much better.
Damien writes many great modules and great articles for the community. I don't know anything about the other guy but this is a great charity to give to so we can free up uber 3l337 Perl hackers from their day jobs to make Perl even better.
Are these guys working on Perl.NET? Do I have to have a Passport account to donate?
Order today, and we'll include a Randal Schwartz at no additional cost!!!
This sig intentionally left justified.
ok I'm probably just a victim of sleep derprivation
I meant "sell them on Ebay" not "see them on Ebay"
and I don't know why I put the "of" in the second sentance, "againt" should be "against", etc.
sorry folks
Man can't someone make a joke on ./ anymore? It's not like this is a topic that needs lots of serious discussion. If anyone gets a chance to meta moderate this, get rid of the offtopic.
That got me thinking: could the money be better used elsewhere? A $10 donation to a PERL hacker will buy him a six pack and some chips. $10 to the right humanitarian organization will literally save people's lives. But I guess that with donating to the PERL guys, you'll actually get to see some results from your charity. With most humanitarian groups you never know where the money goes.
And if we cut out all the extras* we spend money on we can feed a lot of people!!!
*extras mean anything other than basic food stuffs, no cable tv, nothing not absolutly needed for everyday life....
In this case I might go against my set ways, but if they'd set up an Honor System account I wouldn't be writing this note right now, I'd be donating!
I ordered a Tim Conway awhile back because he was on clearance. The first sales rep didn't even know they still had one around. Well, they sent me a Damian Conway instead. I couldn't get him to do the "Dorf" bit, and he wouldn't wear stupid clothes or talk like a Norwegian at all. I tried to return him, but they wouldn't take him back because when I opened the box, I automatically agreed to their EULA which was inside.
Finally, after several weeks of complaining they let me ship him back for an exchage. Except they accidentally sent me Conway Twitty this time. Actually I'm not so sure it was an accident. Anyway, Conway Twitty happily does a norwegian accent so I'm fairly satisfied. Except he keeps trying to seduce my grandma...
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Perhaps the Perl community could calculate some recommended annual contribution per line of code for companies that use Perl. (E.g. 100k lines of code at $0.01/line/year = $1000.) Do some comparisons with how much companies pay for commercial compilers compared to how many lines of code they have to show them that they are getting a good deal (applying corrections for the absence of tech support and manuals not being included in the price.)
Of course, the Perl Foundation is not the only ligitimate recipient of such contributions.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Actually, you wanna see something would really twist C's noodle? Try this one:
push(@list, "element${_}") for (1 .. 20);
And of course, there are all sorts of cool things built into Perl. Like the "spaceship" operator, regexes, the || and && operators returning the last value evaluated (as opposed to 1 or 0), about five hundred ways to iterate/loop, $_, etc. There's also my personal favorites: lack of strong (any, really) typing and being able to create any type of variable/structure on the fly. They're also Perl's largest complaints, which is probably why I'm so partial to them. There's nothing like being able to just make a "$foo = 123;" statement and then append a string to it... :-)
But the orginal poster was correct: Perl can be very complex. It can also be very simple. It's like they say, Perl makes easy things easy and hard things possible. I love having enough rope to hang myself; others need more structure. To each his own. Choice is a very good thing.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Dude, I lurked for a long time before getting a username. Try looking up the definition of lurking sometime, dumbass. Oh, and get a real username. Only lamers post as anonymous cowards.
Damian has a nice description of things he wants to work on at the yetanother.org link above (terrible color scheme, btw - only suitable for very late-night browsing).
And who are they going to "buy" if they can only raise half the necessary funds?
The more examples I see of this the more I've come to see that the open-source development model is getting less and less credible as a way to do large-scale projects.
Developing software using the proprietary model may not always produce the greatest code, but there's no doubt that it provides a good income to thousands of developers with average skills that allows them to support their families.
Open source gurus with a begging bowl?
A clear demonstration that the system as-is has failed.
http://search.cpan.org/doc/MSCHWERN/Test-More-0.08 /lib/Test/More.pm
This kind of yeoman's work is representative of the stuff Schwern does to make Perl better. Complements the Conway.
On one hand: This is great for Perl. Anyone who has dabbled in the language knows that Damian has Plans for Perl what we mere mortals can never truly understand. I'm still drooling over the thought of a proper switch statement in Perl. As for curried expressions, well, if they're anything as good as curried chicken, I'm all for it.
On the other hand: There's a whole generation of Monash University students growing up without having the joy of being taught by Damian. The poor things are getting substandard teaching (well, actually, they're probably getting standard teaching; what I know they're not getting is superstandard teaching), and they are graduating without the fond memories of the acted-out-in-lectures singles-bar analogy for C++ polymorphism. (You Monash graduates know what I'm talking about.)
On the gripping hand: I'm easily the next-best Perl programmer to be teaching at Monash University. With Damian out of the way, it's only a matter of time before total domination of Monash is mine . . .
I realize you're trolling, but I'm taking the bait. Complex data structures like this are where Perl shines.
For example:
my $list_of_lists = [
['foo', 'bar', 'baz'],
['a', 'b', 'c'],
];
And then to print it out...
foreach my $list (@$list_of_lists) {
print join (' ', @$list);
print "\n";
}
It's really quite easy.
We use Perl for many tasks where I work, and have several thousand lines of our own library files. I've found it to be very maintainable and incredibly flexible. Our coders write excellent, well-designed, readable code in Perl. Most of the time we take advantage of Perl's easy, powerful features so we can develop quickly. However, when we need to optimize, that's available as well. It's turned out to be a great tool for us.
--Bruce
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
And if we cut out all the extras* we spend money on we can feed a lot of people!!!
:-/ Quoting a old film: "fuck the doomed"[1]
Donating to support these guys, and keep them working in the public interest benefits me immediately, as I use software that uses perl, or at the very least I use software that uses software that uses perl. They do good work for us as a software community, so turning around and supporting them has immediate, tangible benefits.
On the other hand, feeding the otherwise doomed throughout the world provides us with no real benefits and is indeed detrimental, as there are more people with whome we must then compete for oxygen, or at least listen to their bitching and moaning because we have something they don't, or don't worship their god, or do worship their god but not by the same name, or do worship their god by the same name but not in the same way, etc. etc. ad nauseum. Better that they just die and clear out the way for more sensible, or at least more civil, folks.
Besides, the Saudis have returned the favor of having the industrialized world make them incredibly wealthy by becoming a source of hatred and terrorism directed against the very cultures that made them rich. What makes you think helping some other disadvanted sop with free handouts is going to have any better effect down the road.
Yes, I just got done watching the Osama tape and it shows.
[1]Where the Buffalo Roam
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I have to wonder if this type of system would work by renting major contributors to other open source
projects such as Linux, KDE, Gnome, Office etc, so that they could devote their full time to developing the software much like Microsoft is able to keep a full time staff of programmers working on nothing but Windows or Office.
Could even work on a voting system. Maybe a dollar a vote up to 20 votes. If someone gets voted in that can not maintain/manage the code and improve it, the dollars/votes get donated to another candidate.
Maybe its already being done and I am just not aware of it.
#!/Damian/is/my/bitch
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Given the programmers' salaries paid to programmers in "First World" countries, how about pushing development to countries with lower cost of living, salaries, etc.?
Of course you won't get stellar free software gurus at once, but you can grow the developers.
Actually Larry got laid off in the recent cuts at O'Reilly.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
At least the Perl community hasn't rigged up PBS.pm that breaks in while a program is running to ask for money....
remember when it was {of|for|by} the people?
nor the fact that you STRAIGHT UP missed the first post. now go crawl back into your lurking hole and leave the FP's to the men.
(a different AC)