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DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

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Re: DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#111

Post by gregw2 »

shagie wrote: post #19
forgetfreeman wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl is maybe the most enjoyable language I've ever coded in up until I'm forced to read someone else's code which is always hellish.

As a perl programmer from decades past (I transitioned to Java during the perl 6 winter), I've been finding that groovy and even more recently scala are really nice tools for what I'd have traditionally done in perl. When doing this year's advent of code, some of the terseness of symbols reminded me of perl. Perl lost me and I transitioned too far away from its ecosystem professionally to return for more than a dalli…

One of my impressions as a Scala newbie coming from a perl background years ago was that Scala practitioners' culture in a corporate setting tended to end up with code bases that reminded me of corporate perl code bases - suffering from "theres more than one way to do it" disease. A bit too easy to be obscure for me to use/recommend it since then despite the nice typing, actors, lazy evaluation, etc. Not sure if this TMTOWTDI Scala resonates with others knowing both or not...

Re: DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#112

Post by altairprime »

esaym wrote: post #21

Craigslist used to donate over $100,000 every single year. Not sure when that stopped. That is really what kept perl going between the years of 2010 and 2016 or so. The board was actually paying a couple of people to do maintenance on the core repository and code. I believe they still do that but obviously due to deficits that is going to get difficult. It's sad when so many companies are dependent upon perl, but don…

It says a lot about how threatened these companies must be: AT&T claims to be profitable, but their infrastructure investment is focused entirely on obstructing competitors. Craigslist used to be a star, but they must be under severe pressure to avoid collapse to have withdrawn ecosystem donations. It says a lot about the fragility of DuckDuckGo that this is all they could commit to Perl, which is really unfortunate; they could have been excellent, but instead their star is apparently diminishing. Oh well.

Re: DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#113

Post by leejo »

gspencley wrote: post #107
leejo wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm surprised to learn that Perl is still used. For this year's London Perl & Raku workshop I shortlisted 70 companies to look for sponsorship. That was with minimal research and effort. These ranged from long term ("legacy") users of Perl to startups. From small companies to very large and profitable fintechs. I cover this briefly in the talk I gave at the end of the workshop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el7qH…

> Programming languages don't die, they just stop being talked about in favour of the shiny new ones. You're largely preaching to the choir, I don't disagree with anything you said. As a web application developer who got started professionally in the 1990s, I not only vividly remember Perl being everywhere, I actively wrote a lot of it. However, in my more recent experience, it is more likely to hear people talk abou…

I don't disagree with anything you've said either, in fact I've blogged about this at length: http://leejo.github.io/2017/12/17/tpc_and_the_end_of_languag...

My main issue is that "People still use Perl?" has essentially become a meme at this point. I'm relatively sure that any sufficiently commented on or upvoted thread on HN gets that statement in it somewhere.

Yes, Perl is still used. Extensively. People and companies just don't talk about it. That's the problem with Perl these days.

(Personally I think TAP and CPAN were Perl's greatest contributions, as I was never a heavy user of regexp).

Re: DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#114

Post by shagie »

gregw2 wrote: post #111
shagie wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a perl programmer from decades past (I transitioned to Java during the perl 6 winter), I've been finding that groovy and even more recently scala are really nice tools for what I'd have traditionally done in perl. When doing this year's advent of code, some of the terseness of symbols reminded me of perl. Perl lost me and I transitioned too far away from its ecosystem professionally to return for more than a dalli…

One of my impressions as a Scala newbie coming from a perl background years ago was that Scala practitioners' culture in a corporate setting tended to end up with code bases that reminded me of corporate perl code bases - suffering from "theres more than one way to do it" disease. A bit too easy to be obscure for me to use/recommend it since then despite the nice typing, actors, lazy evaluation, etc. Not sure if this…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6959326

> Scala feels like the Perl of the modern era: there is more than one way to do it. There is value in that mode of thinking, and Perl is a better language than people give it credit for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2603425

> This actually is one of my frustrations with Scala, too many right ways to do the same thing. Makes it easier to write but harder to read especially when people have drastically differing styles. One of the advantages of Java is how easy it is to read and use someone else's code since the base language is so limited.

---

The question of company dialects for various languages comes up occasionally. You can see it with people talking about having to learn a new LISP (or Scheme) each time they switch to a different company.

I suspect that flexibility is similar to what is seen in perl, ruby, scala, and groovy.

The TMTOWTDI Scala exists... but I want to say that it is more a reflection of the power of the language (drawing from their LISP heritage). It becomes then a question of how much does the company impose a consistent way of doing it within the company (compare the different company dialects).

Re: DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#115

Post by portaouflop »

knowitnone wrote: post #25
portaouflop wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop doing it for free it the only way, OSS projects that rely on donations almost always do badly economically

ok. say they charge every user or business $100 a year. that would certainly kill off Perl

I’m not saying it’s practical right now, but yea the death of Perl is the only thing that can make it profitable.

Re: DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#116

Post by forgetfreeman »

saalweachter wrote: post #23
forgetfreeman wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl is maybe the most enjoyable language I've ever coded in up until I'm forced to read someone else's code which is always hellish.

My impression of Perl, as someone who wrote two scripts in it twenty years ago and has been on the Internet since the middle-old days, is that it is a language suited to being clever.

This observation is spot on and 100% of the reason why dealing with other people's code is insufferable. After 20 years of coding I can confidently say I'd rather clean out crawlspaces for a living than deal with another "clever" codebase.

Re: DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#117

Post by philistine »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #67
dep_b wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s being phased out quite aggressively there. Turned out they had such a bad reputation for tech debt thru couldn’t hire people despite paying +50% median Amsterdam developer salaries.

I think a lot of companies are kind of realising the tech stack they use has a bigger impact on hiring than salaries. I believe banks are encountering this issue with no one wanting to do C++ anymore.

I guess with C++ you either work for a bank or you do video games. Guess which one people prefer?

Re: DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#118

Post by anticorporate »

creato wrote: post #104
anticorporate wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they owe anything today, in the sense of a legal obligation? No. But we've regulated the tragedy of the commons in all sorts of other instances. There's no reason, for example, that a small percentage of corporate income tax couldn't be allocated to a grant program for free and open source software projects.

> There's no reason There definitely is a reason, and it's the same reason this problem exists in the first place: it's hard to measure the value a library or tool generates, whether it's open source or not. How are you going to allocate this tax to projects at scale? Companies already can barely solve this problem internally, and often fail completely at it. Just imagine how many times you read a comment on HN lamen…

Grants don't need to be given on the basis of usage alone. Generally speaking, the people on a grants committee would be knowledgeable industry experts who make allocation based on a number of factors like impact, ability of the organization receiving the funds the utilize them well, the sustainability of the project as a whole, the success of previous grant projects, etc.

Re: DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#120

Post by orev »

benatkin wrote: post #108
orev wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re trying to sell something, you need to be where the customers are. If they’re on Marketplace, that’s where you go. You can easily list in both places.

Not a good enough reason for me to go back to using Facebook regularly. For others, sure.

There’s no requirement to be actively reading and posting to Facebook in order to use Marketplace.
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