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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.
who is profiting from the development of perl, and would get money for various reasons if perl6 were finished?
:)
.NET by Everybody Else, and could potentially make a lot of money for people in general if the technology there were applied.
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
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.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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.
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.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
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 :-)
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?
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.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
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.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
$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.
--- What
(* 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
Table-ized A.I.
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!
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