The Perl Foundation Grants Are Running Out

dogma01 writes "It looks like the grants to fund: Larry, Damian, and Dan have pretty much run out. :(" Keeping guys like these working on Perl is definitely a good thing(tm) if you are looking to support the Open Source Community somehow. You can donate here if you are feeling generous.

Comments

Fund the little but interesting projects

[codexus]

Perl was not designed to do what it's now being used for. The result is an awfully designed language made of layers and layers of incoherent stuff. Wouldn't the money be better used on projects that not as many people have heard about but that have a lot of potential if they can be completed?

Re:Fund the little but interesting projects

[shoppa]

Perl was not designed to do what it's now being used for.

A tool that is "top-down" spec'ed, analyzed, and designed will be good for exactly what it was defined for. Perl has grown in ways that such a designed language never could.

To me, the true mark of success for a tool is that it gets used for all sorts of things for which it was not designed. In this way, Perl is the biggest success story of all time.

The result is an awfully designed language made of layers and layers of incoherent stuff.

It has been cleaned up, slowly. It has wonderful OO techniques available (although they probably do not appeal to anyone who believes that C++ is "object oriented"). The worst punctuation-based built-ins now have symbolic names. But yes, it is kinda messy, in a way very similar to English.

Well-designed human languages (e.g. Esperanto) don't fare too well in comparison to the ugly mess ones, either :-)

Re:Fund the little but interesting projects

[Anonymous Coward]

Listen up, fool, for I am about to give you some advice:

Your problem is that you try too hard. Making comments like that doesn't draw many replies. People generally just read it - assuming they browse at -1, which most don't - then think 'what an idiot' and move on. It's simply not worth a reply.

However, I feel it would be helpful to give you some advice on your technique.

If you wish to be a successful troll, study the work of the masters, who will get a trollish comment modded up to +5 and a fistful of bites while leaving it obvious to those with a clue that their comment was just a common troll.

The basic rule is try to fit in. Don't make it obvious. Be subtle. In short, do the complete opposite to what you are trying to do.

It is your lack of subtlety that shows your immaturity. Hopefully one day you will learn.

Isn't there anyone

[Anonymous Coward]

who is profiting from the development of perl, and would get money for various reasons if perl6 were finished?

Redhat? Mysql AB? Umm.. OSDN? Hemos is subsidizing everything2 already, maybe he could subsidize a bit of Perl6 as well :)

Hell, one would think that they could almost go to the bank and get a loan to finish perl 6, and use the expected profits from the O'Reiley Camel Book for Perl 6 as collateral. They will certainly make lots of money off of that, i've looked at the perl 6 apocalypses and there is DEFINITELY going to be NO WAY that you will be able to make sense of it without buying the book.

It's disappointing that the rest of the computer industry isn't jumping on Parrot as a potential competitor to CLR, as a truly great cross-language cross-platform universal bytecode engine.. i really think that would be a huge step toward the overpowering of .NET by Everybody Else, and could potentially make a lot of money for people in general if the technology there were applied.

Re:What's left to do?

[Reality Master 101]

I have been a Perl guru since version 2.0, and I can honestly say that the features added since that time have not made my life any easier.

You never use references?? If you have no necessity for hash references or list references for complex data structures, then your Perl needs must be pretty low.

Re:Donate to PHP

[bryhhh]

You can't compare perl and php like this. perl does much more than provide dynamic content in web pages. I've just written a perl script to migrate 20,000 users from an NT domain to a Windows 2000 active directory. I doubt that PHP could do this. Both perl and php are excellent products. Which one is better? that clearly depends upon the application.

Kernighan and Ritchie?

[ceswiedler]

Do we fund Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie? Or Bjarne Stroustroup? No; all three of them are "funded" by having actual jobs, and the task of adding "features" to C and C++ are handled by international or ANSI committees. Is there a fund for Linus or any of the other Linux kernel hackers? No, they all have jobs with actual companies.

Re:Kernighan and Ritchie?

[bcrowell]

...the task of adding "features" to C and C++ are handled by international or ANSI committees.
C++ is such a monstrosity, it's clear that there were too many committees involved.

Is there a fund for Linus or any of the other Linux kernel hackers?
False analogy. People sell Linux distributions, and make money that way. That's why Red Hat can pay Alan Cox a salary. Nobody sells Perl interpreters.

Do we fund Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie? Or Bjarne Stroustroup?
False analogy. Larry Wall wrote an open-source implementation of Perl. K&R and Stroustroup didn't write open-source implementations of C and C++.

The funding model you advocate resulted in badly designed languages(*) that didn't get free implementations until decades later. The funding model Perl is using has resulted in a well designed language that has always been available in free implementations.

*Especially C++, but C too. The fact that something like autoconf is necessary shows that certain aspects of C were really botched.

Begging doesn't work

[turnstyle]

I've been providing streaming MP3 software for about 2 years, and had hoped that my 'tryware' approach would work. It doesn't. I have tens of thousands of users, and I've received thousands of positive emails, but I'd say that less than 0.5% ever gave anything.

You just can't support a full-time effort by relying on generosity. I still offer a free trial, but I now also have commercial versions for sale, and I only wish that I made that move a year ago.

Perl 6

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what people fail to realize about Perl 6.

The entire purpose of the current Perl 6 development is to generalize Perl.

In other words, Wall et all saw that Perl was being used for purposes it was never, ever intended for, and are seeking to make a more flexible yet consistent tool, one that can be used for the crazy-ass things people use it for without being stretched to the breaking point.

This is what the money will go toward if you send something to the perl foundation funds. Fixing the mess that perl has become. Wall is very open about this.

Part of this is that the language has become simply huge, but you have to understand that they're expecting third parties-- makers of libraries and development tools-- to offer an environment in which that huge layered monstrosity can be cut down, and you can be left with just the subset of Perl's possibility that is left for you. Think of this like quake 3 and doom 3; they looks beautiful, they aren't very useful all on their own, and they are mostly platforms for other developers to start with so that they can make something insanely great very quickly.

In short, i would say that donating to perl 6 really does help more in the long run-- because instead of directly helping one little projects, you are indirectly helping many, many little projects to reach their goals quicker and better than they could have otherwise. You are donating to something for the little projects to build on.

(P.S.: expect to see some new form of use strict; (one which does strong type checking and lots of other things to let you reign in perl's extreme expressiveness to the point you are always sure what you are doing) become very popular in the enterprise once Perl 6 has settled..)

Ask yourself...

[Anonymous Coward]

For 18 months of Damian and half a year of Dan and Larry... what has been produced? What finished products can we take back to our workplace and use?

Mailing list traffic? Apocalypses/Exegeses? Acme::*? A lot of travel time and expenses? Lectures given in far away cities to a few hundred perl hackers?

Half a design for a language nobody really begged for?

Re:Ask yourself...

[babbage]

You're right -- 30 man-months of effort, 18 months of calendar time -- has yet to produce a completed version of Perl6. But you know what? I wasn't along for this part of the ride, but according to Damian, it took maybe two or three years for iterations 2 & 3 of Perl, and four or five years to produce versions 4 & 5. That was all with volunteer effort.

Perl6 is arguably more complex than versions 1-5 combined, and yet it is coming along at a faster clip than any of the earlier iterations did -- largely because, yes, people have donated money so that these three very talented language designers can attack the problem more or less full time. It's foolish to expect this generation of Perl, as complex as it is, to come out in 1/4 the time that the most recent versions took. On the contrary, if it takes "only" 5 years, we can be glad that it arrived as soon as it did thanks to the full-time work these guys have been able to put in.

Also, it's worth noting that Perl has always been one of the first "mainstream" languages to bring features from special purpose academic languages to a wider audience, and Perl6 is a strong continuation of this history. Most people are probably unaware of constructs like regular expressions [version??], closures [Perl5], co-routines, currying functions, and continuations [all Perl6], so why would you expect masses of people to be "begging" for them? And yet once these features get implemented in Perl, they've had a tendency to start being demanded in other languages too -- witness Java recently adopting Perl-esque regexes, even as the Perl6 regex design is evolving away from simple pattern matching engine and into a more sophisticated grammar recognizing parser like Parse::RecDescent, lex, or yacc/bison.

So really, this kind of comment is nothing but trollbait, and I'm falling for it. Perl6, even half-fleshed out, is a tremendous leap forward compared to Perl5, and I for one feel lucky to have these guys focusing on it. In spite of your naked assertion at the end there, the RFC process that kicked off Perl6 development -- with well over 300 well thought out documents that took months for Larry to properly analyze -- well proves that people *were* begging for change, and slowly but surely it is happening. I hope that some magician can produce the funds to keep the Perl6 roadshow on the road, because within a couple of years I want to be able to use this wonderful new version of Perl. If the show ends now, it'll be years longer before Perl6 ever sees the light of day...

Re:I'd port to PHP instead

[medcalf]

Why port at all? Slashcode obviously works, and scales really well. Porting would at best be make-work, unless there's some really necessary feature that can't be implemented without rearchitecting the entire codebase.

And if the coders have that much time on their hands, they can fire a few people and cut down on the amount of advertising they do to support the staff overhead.

Not Just For Perl Development

[twoshortplanks]

The money is also being used to develop parrot, "a virtual machine used to efficiently execute bytecode for interpreted languages".

Essentially this is the new virtual machine Perl 6 will be targeting (what Perl 6 will be compiled into before it is run.) But Perl will not be the only language that will run on this. People are working on making Python, PHP and even Java run on this same machine. It's about working together people.

Oh, I know it's much more fun to say "nah ne nah nah, my language is better than yours". But the Perl people want to work in an interoperable world where we can all code stuff in whatever language we want and it'll all work together. And this is their effort.

Now if you want to slam this down and winge, then it's up to you and I'm sure I'll waste my time reading your comments. However, if you want to actually do something about this kind of thing, you know where the donate button is.

Where did you learn math?

[Marc2k]

$200,000 = total amount raised over 2 years

Damian was given a grant over an 18 month span.
Dan over 6.
Larry over 6.

18 + 6 + 6 = 30

200,000 / 30 = $6,666.67 per programmer month WITHOUT any expenses whatsoever.

even that is 80,000 per year (again with no expenses, individual or organizational), which is not that far off for senior programmers, a lot less in reality, considering they have experience overseeing large software projects.

Re:OOP == Big? (was: Perl 6 is a mistake)

[Tablizer]

(* What makes OO powerful is basically the ability of putting a whole lot of messy code behind a small interface. Hide all the code behind hundred of interfaces, and little at a time, improve it in the general direction you want. *)

*Small* interface? Bwaaaa haa haaa!

Interfaces can be built just fine without OO.

I will believe the OO hype when I see side-by-side biz app code of OO kicking procedural/relational's butt in code size, change-impact analysis, or whatever good metric you want to use.

(* It's called "refactoring". *)

"Refactoring" is a euphemism for "cleaning up the code because it did not change as easily as the OO brochure promised".

(* design patterns also help. *)

Do you think OO has a monopoly on "patterns"? The p/r versions of GOF patterns are usually far simpler IMO.

(* Where have you been in the last 10 years? *)

Listening to unproven bullshOOt.

oop.ismad.com

Help US Government!

[AmericanInKiev]

All you need to fund Open Source Software is to donate it to non profit organizations - ie United Way, Federal or State Governments, or better the EFF - and get them to issue a receipt.

In the hands of an otherwise employed programmer, tax exempt donations can be worth 75% of face value.

Just change the GPL or (Insert favorite open source license here) to include a requirement that non-profit organizations must provide donation receipts in exchange for the use of said software.

This in essense will cause the US government to foot the development - which is exactly waht it should do!

AIL