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Fastmail Donates USD 10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

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11–20 of 22 posts

Re: Fastmail Donates USD 10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#11
post #8

I started working in the 10's and I have never met a single developer who actively works with Perl. Sometimes I wonder whether Perl left a huge code base behind, like COBOL did, but I suspect it didn't, mostly due to the fact that Perl is a dynamically typed language used mainly for web development and sysadmin scripting. Perl unlike Java, which had no serious alternative in its niche, unfortunately has an uncertain…

Perl is being migrated to Python. Two of the big banks I know have been running LLM tooling to migrate from. My last job was for a fortune 10 bank.

I personally learnt it at the age of 17 as the homemade switchboard for MSN Messenger bots were coded in it.

I'm 36 now and still not letting go. Something about the syntax pleases my brain. I am currently learning Erlang.

Re: Fastmail Donates USD 10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#13

Originally switched to fastmail in '03 or so because they used perl. Kinda sad they sunset my "lifetime" plan but _guess_ I understand.

Yeah, I was pretty sad about the end of the pobox lifetime discount, but I understand why.

Re: Fastmail Donates USD 10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#14
post #8

I started working in the 10's and I have never met a single developer who actively works with Perl. Sometimes I wonder whether Perl left a huge code base behind, like COBOL did, but I suspect it didn't, mostly due to the fact that Perl is a dynamically typed language used mainly for web development and sysadmin scripting. Perl unlike Java, which had no serious alternative in its niche, unfortunately has an uncertain…

Perl is being migrated to Python. Two of the big banks I know have been running LLM tooling to migrate from. My last job was for a fortune 10 bank. I personally learnt it at the age of 17 as the homemade switchboard for MSN Messenger bots were coded in it. I'm 36 now and still not letting go. Something about the syntax pleases my brain. I am currently learning Erlang.

this

Re: Fastmail Donates USD 10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#15

Long live Perl... it's my favorite CLI scripting language.

there are other good scripting languages but I know Perl so I've never really needed any of them

Same here. I started learning in 1995. I've learned and use other languages but if I have a choice then I use Perl. Most stuff I need to do at work is either Tcl for EDA tools or text report processing where I use Perl

Re: Fastmail Donates USD 10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#16
post #8

I started working in the 10's and I have never met a single developer who actively works with Perl. Sometimes I wonder whether Perl left a huge code base behind, like COBOL did, but I suspect it didn't, mostly due to the fact that Perl is a dynamically typed language used mainly for web development and sysadmin scripting. Perl unlike Java, which had no serious alternative in its niche, unfortunately has an uncertain…

Perl is being migrated to Python. Two of the big banks I know have been running LLM tooling to migrate from. My last job was for a fortune 10 bank. I personally learnt it at the age of 17 as the homemade switchboard for MSN Messenger bots were coded in it. I'm 36 now and still not letting go. Something about the syntax pleases my brain. I am currently learning Erlang.

Were these (bank) applications focused on text-processing or web applications? If they were web applications, I assume they weren't CGIs...

Re: Fastmail Donates USD 10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#17

Originally switched to fastmail in '03 or so because they used perl. Kinda sad they sunset my "lifetime" plan but _guess_ I understand.

Been with them since '04. One of the very few companies where I have literally zero complaints. Still a shame they sunset your plan :(

Re: Fastmail Donates USD 10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#18
post #8

I started working in the 10's and I have never met a single developer who actively works with Perl. Sometimes I wonder whether Perl left a huge code base behind, like COBOL did, but I suspect it didn't, mostly due to the fact that Perl is a dynamically typed language used mainly for web development and sysadmin scripting. Perl unlike Java, which had no serious alternative in its niche, unfortunately has an uncertain…

It was big in the mid-90s for writing web apps, IIRC. There weren't many options in the early days. I was writing web apps in pure C, which wasn't really ideal.

Re: Fastmail Donates USD 10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#19
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

It's not great to see LLM bots posting on HN, though.

I don't know what that post said, but that's the first time I've seen an account nuked so hard its username disappeared too.

Re: Fastmail Donates USD 10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl is being migrated to Python. Two of the big banks I know have been running LLM tooling to migrate from. My last job was for a fortune 10 bank. I personally learnt it at the age of 17 as the homemade switchboard for MSN Messenger bots were coded in it. I'm 36 now and still not letting go. Something about the syntax pleases my brain. I am currently learning Erlang.

Were these (bank) applications focused on text-processing or web applications? If they were web applications, I assume they weren't CGIs...

For what I can expand upon, not web applications per-se. They displayed management pages accessible via browser for different departments to manage, resource management, statistics, estimated costs and calculations.

The main usage were on back office tooling such as reporting back job queues, status of specific jobs, load balancing and the likes.

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