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?

[ranulf]

"The time to leave is now; there is no work left to do"

I take it you've not had a look at the Perl 6 spec. There's a lot of radical new development underfoot. Whether perl needs more features now, given that it is fairly mature is another matter. It seems to do almost everything that people want it to do.

Although, " version 2.0, and I can honestly say that the features added since that time have not made my life any easier. "

How about adding OO? How about special variables gaining names? etc... It's clear that every time perl has been upgraded, it has been of benefit to quite a large chunk of users.

Help, Google!

[Anonymous Coward]

Without extensively using open source software (specifically including Perl), Google would currently owe M$ a little over $200M in software licensing fees. I hope they can step forward and contribute to the effort like AOL/Netscape does for Mozilla!

You're part of the problem

[shoppa]

Donate to PHP It is better than Perl.

Yet another bozo on the bus of folks who think that Perl is only good for CGI.

IMHO Perl will be quite useful long after the web is as obsolete as Gopher. Perl is not just a language, and it's not just for web content; it's a very general and powerful way for thinking about and solving problems.

Ryan Air: The Low Fairs Airline

[Beautyon]

Runs its industrial strength ticketing system on Perl.

How hard can it be to call the people who maintain it and ask them for the Perl Foundation to email Ryan Air and the other huge companies that rely on Perl for a relatively small donation?

Have they made these contacts already?

Re:What Do We Get If We Donate?

[twoshortplanks]

• Have my name introduced as an operator in the language.

  package Carnage4Life;
  require Exporter;
  @ISA = qw(Exporter);
  @EXPORT = qw(Carnage4Life);
  sub Carnage4Life { print "It's all been done" }

• Make whitespace significant to syntax

  See this module

• Rename it from Perl to "Carnage4Life: Scripting Edition

  ln -s "/usr/bin/Carnage4Life: Scripting Edition" "/usr/bin/perl"

• Add C++ templates to the language.

  Perl uses run time polymorphasim, and hence doesn't use a Templating system for code. Or maybe you could just run the C++ code inline

• Include the fuck() and unfuck() function calls that do exactly that.

  Is something that deletes all your source code and still continues to run it close enough?

Did you laugh? Okay, go donate!

Seriously though, these are all silly examples. Perl's used for a lot of sensible stuff. The biggest mistake most people make is mistaking humour like this for a lack of professionalism

Re:So what?

[Camel Pilot]

who is really going to miss it?

I suspect you have never really used Perl. Maybe had to maintain some newbies code or something like that, but that is extent of your experience with Perl.

Lets look at it this way. I propose that C provides more ways to code illegible than Perl. You can write horrible partitioned code, relying on precedence of operations, use lots of global data, recursively loading include files, using multi deep redirection when not necessary. Perl on the other hand has a some "features" that allow a coder to clarify their work, such as variable interpolation so that string concatentation looks cleaner

$str = "Time is $time in the $day day of the $month month.

vs

str = "Time is " + time + "in the " + day + "day of the " + month + " month".

Or the use of operators such as "unless", "or", "foreach", etc

Or the use of named parameters in function calls

Or the use of symbolic references.

Or use of the comments in reg expression.

I suspect the reg expression are the chief reason for your compliant on "ASCII explosion". Reg expression is a language of its own but knowledge of reg expression is pure power, it is compact expression where a single expression represents pages of code.

IMHO I love the intergral inclusion of reg expressions within the langauge framework. It is one Perl's strength. Without it would just be another "for,if,else,while,goto" language

Re:I'm hard pressed...

[Elian]

Working on Perl 6, both the design and the software, is our job. That's what we do, and it's full time work plus some. It'd be great if we could work on it on the side, but that's not feasable--not for us or for almost anyone else.

Things the size of perl, or python, or ruby, or linux, or apache, take an enourmous amount of work, and the bigger the project gets the more work it takes. The folks doing the majority of the design work are already supported to do it in some way: Matz is paid to work on Ruby, Guido's paid by Zope to work on Python, Linus and many of the Linux folks are paid to do the work they're doing by their employers, and many of the Apache developers are being paid to work on Apache. And for large projects, like perl 5, where the lead is a full volunteer, they couldn't do what they're doing without a huge contribution and sacrifice by family.

We're trying a slightly diffrent approach, with direct grants rather than indirect ones, relying on the community to support us rather than, say, IBM or HP. And we're not asking people who can't make ends meet to donate money, but we are asking that people and companies that use perl to throw some cash into the hat.

It's a pleasant myth that large software projects can be done for free entirely in the spare time of volunteers, but that's never been true. Either companies have paid in one form or another for the work (knowingly or unknowingly) or individuals have sacrificed a lot of their personal lives to make it happen.