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Craigslist Donates $100,000 To the Perl Foundation
mikejuk writes "The craigslist Charitable Fund has donated $100,000 to the Perl community for Perl5 maintenance and general use by the Perl Foundation. Craigslist gets more than 30 billion views per month and it is mostly written in Perl. The entire architecture of the system is open source — a proxy array based on Perl and memcache and a backend provided by Apache, memcache, MySQL and, of course, Perl. This is a successful enterprise giving something back to open source — which is how it should be."
Nice from the Craigslist folks. Aren't they eBay-owned though? Anyway, good to see perl getting some loving for a change.
Troll much? You can always tell a made-up complaint because it describes a situation nothing like reality, and has a tone of venomous contempt that is excessive given the situation. People with no money to buy the item? Ok, maybe some people low-ball you but I have found that is easily curtailed by stating. "SERIOUSLY NO LOW-BALL OFFERS PRICE FIRM" on the ad. As for scams I get about 5% spam response rate on most things. They are super-obvious. Guess what. I click delete. I also get several offer emails usually and can only sell to one person! OMG, the horrors of selling something for free.
"sometimes he felt that his whole life was a dream, and he wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."
In its hay days during the Late 90's and Early 2000's there was a lot of PERL Development, but it seems it has dropped off and PERL lost its shine.
Frankly, Perl got it all more or less right already in early 2000s. So obviously there is not much development happening: Perl already works pretty well. Most new releases have mostly bug fixes - but also some minor syntax improvements and features from the Perl6.
IOW, Perl lost its shine only in the eyes of those who are after shiny. Perl is pretty down to earth tool to get the job done.
But back in the day every time you tried to find an open source program to do something it required PERL
Perl defines portability properly and allows one to access quite a lot of system-specific resources - in the system-specific way. Thus it was (and in some areas still is) quite popular as the language for install scripts of all sorts.
Even now, Perl remains one of the few power tools to be most commonly included in the fresh UNIX system installs (including Debian and Mac OS X). There is no other language/tool which is as stable and as portable: that's why it is possible and useful to include it into the OS install.
Not so much of this any more, is it because I have changed how I look for software or is it because PERL is no longer as popular as it was before.
IMO, Perl greatest weakness is the interface to other libraries (the PerlXS). It is not an easy task to make a Perl binding. It's fscking hard and includes lots of copy-paste. That's why Perl lacks many up-to-date bindings to many up-to-date libraries, what makes it not so suitable for many up-to-date tasks. Even Perl6 went on and pretty much excluded the XS/etc from the spec. What sucks and makes Perl6 worse (and useless to me) than the Perl5, because on top of general problem with bindings, Perl6 adds fragmentation: extensions written for different Perl6 implementation are incompatible with each other.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.