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

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.

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: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 :-)

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.

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...