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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!
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.
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.
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