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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.
Perl is definitely a good thing(tm), your favorite website depends on it!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
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 :-)
will Larry personally convert all my existing code so it will work under Perl 6?
Basically I'd like to find out what level of contribution it would take to
- Have my name introduced as an operator in the language.
- Make whitespace significant to syntax
- Rename it from Perl to "Carnage4Life: Scripting Edition"
- Add C++ templates to the language.
- Include the fuck() and unfuck() function calls that do exactly that.
I await the answers to these questions with bated breath.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.
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
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...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
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.
I'll let Larry and Dan speak for themselves, but as for myself: in the eighteen months I was supported by the Perl community I produced the following...
- Released 55 significant updates to 21 CPAN modules...
...including 16 entirely new modules... ...5 of which were subsequently considered important enough to be included in the Perl 5.8 core distribution;- Wrote four extended documents (Exegeses 2,3,4 and Synopsis 5) explaining the Perl 6 design;
- Wrote a Perl Journal article on the practicalities of porting Perl 5 code to Perl 6;
- Developed a 125 page alternative design for a future Perl (named Perl 5+i), much of which has fed back into the Perl 6 design process;
- Wrote several articles for various Perl community channels like use.perl;
- Added 88 discussion nodes to the Perl Monks website;
- Posted 192 responses to messages posted on the comp.lang.perl.* newsgroups;
- Replied to over 5000 Perl-related email messages;
- Gave 167 hours of presentations on 56 Perl topics in 21 different cities in 9 countries on 4 continents.
These, for a start...- Attribute::Handlers
- Attribute::Handlers::Prospective
- Attribute::Types
- Class::Delegation
- Filter::Simple
- Getopt::Declare
- Hook::LexWrap
- Inline::Files
- Lingua::EN Inflect
- NEXT
- Parse::RecDescent
- Perl6::Currying
- Perl6::Placeholders
- Perl6::Variables
- Regexp::Common
- Switch
- Text::Balanced
- Text::Reform
Yes. That's where the community converses. Yes. Designing Perl 6 was the main job we were asked to do. Sure. Play is where the community coheres. Yes. Too much. 28 weeks apart from my family.But hundreds of extraordinary individuals and organizations did collectively donate over $210,000 in the last 18 months to ensure that the work we were doing would continue. And donations more than doubled in the second 9 months of fund-raising.
I had always assumed that was because the community approved of what we were doing.
Damian