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Call For Grant Proposals In Perl Development
On Elpeleg writes "The Perl Foundation is giving out grants for Perl development ranging from $500 to $3,000 in February 2009. You neither need to have a large, complex, or lengthy project nor be a Perl master or guru. You are encouraged to submit a proposal if you have a good idea and the means and ability to accomplish your Perl project. The deadline for proposal submissions is January 31, 2009."
Your proposal must be submitted in the form of a self-aware regular expression with at least 200 backreferences.
I make over 120K a year programming in Perl.
1) Better tools... improve EPIC. Perl lacks a good IDE.
2) Get perl running on IIS using ISAPI (basically, mod_perl for IIS).
3) Either finish Perl6 or give up. Nobody cares about the CLR thing, give us Perl6 the language. The delay in shipping Perl6 is killing the language.
4) ????
5) Create a branch in CPAN called Ponies::*. There are many libraries for ponies such as Ponies::Little or Ponies::Fast.
I only make $86k (+misc stock), but then again, I'm not quite 2 years out of college.
You neither need to have a large, complex, or lengthy project nor be a Perl master or guru.
You do, however, have to be able to fit it all on one line.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
That means you're really going to be doing it for the honor. In that case forget the money and rather make a "hall of fame", something like: http://armlinux.simtec.co.uk/whoswho.html . That's worth more for a good consultant and costs almost nothing to give out as a prize.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I don't suppose a program to convert all my Perl programs over to a non-dead-end language is going to get any grant money? :)
All I need is an irritating little quirk in a shell and some time to smooth out a well-rounded glossy proposal.
Six figure salaries for a programmer is a sign of doom for the language. Nobody else is willing to do your job because the rest of the world has moved on. If only I could have my days as a $35/hr. VB 6.0 programmer back.
Perl is the best glue there is. It works on everything. Still, I would not build a house out of glue.
Some places DO seem to pay that kind of money. Or the GP lied. Or the really is good (the Perl world has some really smart and interesting people).
The real problem for Perl is the bad hype, which your tro... hrm, guessing without facts, is a typical example of.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
I don't get it. If you make like $129K or $121K, why don't you just say so, rather than this "over than" stuff? I don't think anybody's going to look at that and think, "hey, maybe he makes $900K! He did say *over*, after all!" That and you're posting as AC, which shouldn't make it a big deal... :D
"over than." sigh. I hope this vista upgrade finishes soon so I can go to bed.
US$35/hr to code in VB? I'm going to have to assume the benefits were good. Something along the lines of, "Location: Strip Club". I can think of no other plausible reason to subject yourself to that pain for so little money.
someone should make a bullshit undocumented language with fucked up syntax and call it "Eels".
then someone else can use it to make a bullshit framework for lazy fucks called Hovercraft.
Guess how many lines it takes in Ruby?
Does that include the lines to take the cock out of your mouth or not?
I think this hackneyed PERL is dead rhetoric is finally starting to annoy me. Is the current development direction moving away from PERL as a language for web development? Absolutely. I find myself using PERL for basic tasks I don't feel like writing code for in say C# or Java because it is annoying to do so and I can do it in a few lines in PERL. So the purpose of the language has changed dramatically and at the same time not at all, since that usage is pretty much at the heart of PERL's origins.
I say then that projects funded should help ensure that this remains the case. So perhaps more database interfaces for DBI. Perhaps a quick search through CPAN for things that have not been updated in a year or so. It might be easy and worth say $3,000 dollars or so to do. Minimal work minor update stuff because Perl6 stuff has moved much of the development for Perl5 into maintenance mode.
in theory I agree. In practice, you should try uninstalling it.
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
print "Hello, world!\n";
How much will I get for this?
Funnily, that isn't even all too off-topic in a discussion on perl. But I'm not for it, anyway. I like my camels with a bit of hair.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
The delay in releasing Perl 6 ( shut up with the idiot mantra, "It'll be ready when it's ready" ) has done more to kill off the language than any other factor.
New scripters have taken up Python or Ruby. Old timers have got frustrated at the philosophical debate about what it means to 'release' a language. Some of the people involved with the project appear to be having a bit of a laugh at the expense of the coders who have been using the language. No goals, no milestones. Some airy fairy notion that it will never be complete. The PR job alone has been a total disaster.
It would have been better not to mention Perl 6 until it was ready - haven't you Perl people learnt the lesson about announcing the next product before it is ready for sale and while you still have the old product to shift?
If a stable version of Perl 6 is not released in 2009 then Perl will be left dead in the water. That may already have been the case for some time.
With Perl6 taking almost a decade to complete it doesn't make sense to waste this small amount of money on anything other than getting Perl6 out the door?
In that case, Steve Ballmer and his 7-figure salary should be worried!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I make pretty good money doing Perl too but it seems right to give back too.
when I read this post was the Ministry of Silly Walks and their grants, I don't know why :-P
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Programming is good for health
What is killing perl (at least at my job) is it's lack of a proper, modern, standards compliant webservices toolkit.
SOAP::Lite is a sorry mess. It's *simply amazing* that it works *at all*. I've tried to scratch that itch to fix it so many times, but the internals of SOAP::Lite are so *incredibly* convoluted, that it's damn near impossible.
Perl needs a completely new SOAP toolkit, with real WSDL support for all the different document modes.
That ONE thing will keep perl entrenched deep in the guts of the corporate world, in the end ... providing all of us perl hackers with job security for years to come.
So ... I've got a pretty steady day job, and no time at night. I already make 6 figgures, and I have a reasonable expectation of employment beyond 1 year.
Surely, there is one of us perlheads out there who is in a position to give a year up to really iron this out in perl. I'd donate even. Like I said, this would be the gift that keeps on giving to the perl community.
Calculate the probability that holding down the shift key and hitting random numbers will produce a valid PERL program.
I suck at making money. I'm a damn wizard at perl and have been doing it for almost 10 years and have never come close to what you are making.
I'm asking my sources for pointers to the some nice government-paid-for-it-so-we-own-it-right? Space Shuttle source code. Or some nice ICBM or IRBM or ABM firmware, that would do. Cruise missile? Cell phone GPS? Whatever.
Knock out a quick proposal for porting to perl (if it isn't written in perl already, that is), and off we go!
What's needed is a perl script that reads other perl scripts and explains them to other programmers.
1) Good IDE's like eclipse or Visual Studio make a programmer more productive. They have refactoring tools, they analyze your code and make it easy to track down where stuff is, they parse your comments to provide very useful tooltips that describe function parameters (intellesense). Without such tools, it takes significantly longer to learn how a new project fits together. Just being able to right click on a bit of code that calls a method and say "goto definition" is worth the price alone.
2) Nonsense. PHP runs on IIS, why shouldn't perl. IIS has a lot of cool stuff going for it these days that apache doesn't.
3) Good.
4) #@$%
5) Ponies my friend, ponies.
If you were starting a new project would you base it on Perl5 when you aren't sure Perl6 is just around the corner? No offense to anybody, but Perl6 is a classic example of the second system syndrome and serves as an excellent reminder of why it is never a good idea to rewrite code. While they were busy rewriting code, PHP, Ruby and Python cleaned their lunch.
It isn't out until I read about its release on Arstechnica and Slashdot.
I agree with you on this. I've yet to see a really good "best practices for perl deployment".
That said, wait until you deploy a PHP application only to find that PHP wasn't compiled with some feature you were using. Good times.
Syntax Coloring and auto-indentation is a baseline that every text editor should support. IDE's parse your code and give you useful information about it. They parse your comments (xmldoc for C#) and use them for tooltips. They help you find function declarations. They help you refactor your code. They help manage your files. They integrate into your version control system. And so on.
To go slightly off topic, I think intellesense was the best invention ever. It gives a programmer a very strong incentive to comment their functions and parameters because those comments show up right away in the IDE.
He(or she) should also point out what location this is in. If you are required to be in a specific geographic area, then that may carry a huge cost. If I can do my job from a beach in Belize, then that's a huge difference from having to live in Manhattan in terms of cost of living.
No one's suggesting you do so for Perl 6 right now. Ask again later this year.
Perl 5 is 14 years old, and its language design still isn't frozen. Almost every question of language design in the past year regarding Perl 6 has come from the implementors, whether people writing the language, people writing specification tests for the language, or writing applications in the language.
That's exactly what we're doing, just simultaneously.
If you're not advocating a waterfall-style approach I apologize -- but I get that impression. I've never seen that process work for any software, especially a programming language. I'm sure you can ask just about any other implementor of Perl 6 and receive the same answer.
how to invest, a novice's guide
Maybe the future will be something more along the lines of Nomadic Pict, or Mozart/Oz or maybe some new experimental linear logic programming language seemingly a perfect fit for exchanging web resources over the internet.
I'm intruiged. In general about the potential of logic programming languages (I'd love to replace SQL with Prolog in a number of contexts), and specifically about your proposition, but I'm not sure I see how constraint/logic programming is the perfect fit for web services. Can you elaborate?
Tweet, tweet.
Anyone?
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
You mean emacs? *cough*
where!? any more jobs?
just kidding. good for you. i'm sure you're not alone in making a good living from perl. it still works, headache-inducing syntax and all.
Mix the right kind of glue with some gravel and sand, and you've got something you can build a house on.
I write in Perl almost everyday. They should build in a lot of the CPAN modules so that they will be documented better (with another camel) and I won't have to dig on CPAN for things a lot of new languages come with out of the box. Yes, it's easy to install modules, but many are almost standards at this point and should be brought into the language.
being tired had nothing to do with it. you're just fucking stupid.
I was wondering if there was an up-to-date graph somewhere. P.S. despite the various ignorant comments, there are some people excited about Perl 6. Thanks for your hard work!
Ross Kendall Web Consultant and Developer (UK) - Drupal and Open Source Solutions