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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

#181
post #99
post #40

I always forget that DDG is written with Perl, even after I emailed yegg a million years ago asking why they used Perl, and he responded back, which was nice of him. I hear Raku is fun, I haven't used it, but I sort of swore a soft oath that I would never touch Perl again about a decade ago after having to debug some regex magic someone did. I'm assuming that once you get past the "hump", Perl becomes fun?

It s just a lang like any other. Even ASM you can write fairly easily if you do it for years. Raku is quite damn cool, you should check it out a bit. As felix[1] said, it realy is something like bash and python having a cool cousin. [1] https://felix-knorr.net/posts/2023-06-24-raku-is-awesome.htm...

Wasn't the original benefit of Perl that it was fairly close to a standard tool, i.e. it was available on pretty much any server you would be pushing a script to anyways?

Raku doesn't seem to have the same ubiquity, while Python is generally available on any system, or even Perl5 is still widely available on pretty much any system. I'd love to start using Raku more but it seems like a hard sell over Python or Bash

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

#182
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed with them once. The worst ever interview with incapable rude interviewers, who didn't even know the answer to their questions. They came p with some bizarre offer which I'm glad I declined.

I knew someone whose company put out $$$ senior job ads when they had a problem they couldn’t solve in house, then picked interviewees’ brains without hiring them.

I would gladly take that experience over "yet another minesweeper something" or its more evil friend "reimplement some esoteric algorithm no one uses in their day job". I mean, sure, fake jobs are always evil but if you're gonna have a fake job at least make it produce something for humanity

The back side of that coin is: how catastrophically dumb must they be to have a problem that a stranger can solve on a whiteboard in an hour but your whole organization can't in a sprint?

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

#183
post #44
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

booking.com is, I think, still a heavy Perl user. I don't know to what degree they give back.

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.

They don't pay very well. I can't imagine the median in amsterdam is very good if that really was 50% higher

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

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd find a lot of talented C++ engineers for the right mission and culture. The problem you describe has little to do with C++ and a lot to do with banking.

I am not sure you understand the problem. Your first sentence hints that you know that there needs to be other things than tech stack and salary to find talented C++ programmers. But the second sentence pretends like you didn't write the first sentence. I said tech stack affects hiring more than salary. I didn't say there is a lack of C++ programmers. I was very explicit about my statement.

You weren't all that explicit, and GP responded to your comment as written. There really is no call for being this rude just because you think you were misunderstood.

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

#185
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. This new trend of maintaining or starting an open source project and then getting upset when people don't send you money is seriously weird. If you want compensation, start a company, otherwise consider anything you receive a gift.

You can also do things like dual licensing. GPL or Affero GPL plus proprietary license. Of course this puts off outside contributors so not if you want a "bazaar" development mode—but people complaining about this are usually not doing so.

First off, the AGPL license is nonfree (and also nonsensical, it is a EULA pretending to be a license), but more importantly, dual licensing means that you don’t actually believe in software freedoms. If you think users have basic and fundamental rights to the software that they run on their computer, you would never release software under proprietary licenses.

It’s like Microsoft’s VS Code nonsense where all the important bits are non free, or any company with “open core”. They don’t care about software freedoms; it’s just open source cosplay.

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

#186
post #164
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. This new trend of maintaining or starting an open source project and then getting upset when people don't send you money is seriously weird. If you want compensation, start a company, otherwise consider anything you receive a gift.

The problem, for some, is that they believed the dream it is possible to make a living out of free software. They forgot to read the footnote on how it actually works in capitalist and money driven societies.

I make a good living only writing public domain software. Most of it is never published to the web.

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

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good thought in isolation. The problem however is how are you going to ensure the money collected for that purpose go to the projects that actually need it and there wont be any corruption involved? It isn't hard to notice, for example, that in EU where gamedev companies often receive grants for various nebulous reasons tend to be companies that do not need the money in the first place (and yes, of course th…

I don't think you're going to solve corruption perfectly in any system, but isn't that a bit of a red herring? We manage to do this within other fields of endeavor, at least in the United States, by using an intermediary. Examples: National Science Foundation, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Endowment for the Arts.

Redistributing tax money to economically unproductive (and usually worthless, as evidenced by the fact that people wouldn’t pay for it voluntarily) endeavors is a whole debate that has nothing to do with open source software.

Ultimately if people value things, they will buy them. Forcing people to pay for things they don’t want to buy simply because you think it would be good for them is a special kind of tyranny.

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

#188
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're going to solve corruption perfectly in any system, but isn't that a bit of a red herring? We manage to do this within other fields of endeavor, at least in the United States, by using an intermediary. Examples: National Science Foundation, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Endowment for the Arts.

Redistributing tax money to economically unproductive (and usually worthless, as evidenced by the fact that people wouldn’t pay for it voluntarily) endeavors is a whole debate that has nothing to do with open source software. Ultimately if people value things, they will buy them. Forcing people to pay for things they don’t want to buy simply because you think it would be good for them is a special kind of tyranny.

> Forcing people to pay for things they don’t want to buy simply because you think it would be good for them is a special kind of tyranny.

Wait until you learn where the rest of your tax dollars get spent.

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

#189
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.

They don't pay very well. I can't imagine the median in amsterdam is very good if that really was 50% higher

Maybe I just negotiated well in a good time to negotiate? But my teammates salaries were sometimes even better

90k top Amsterdam, 135k top at booking, and saw even higher than that for the same position

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

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure you understand the problem. Your first sentence hints that you know that there needs to be other things than tech stack and salary to find talented C++ programmers. But the second sentence pretends like you didn't write the first sentence. I said tech stack affects hiring more than salary. I didn't say there is a lack of C++ programmers. I was very explicit about my statement.

You weren't all that explicit, and GP responded to your comment as written. There really is no call for being this rude just because you think you were misunderstood.

1. I explicitly wrote that people care more about tech stack than salary. Then gave an example where an industry has that problem. The response was about if you have other attributes you can find someone. Fundamentally ignoring the point.

2. Rude? The person who replied did what was said. The first sentence implied that my point was indeed correct. Then the second sentence just ignored what the first sentence implied and ignored the point. They seemed to think the problem is a long-standing problem that banks have. Instead of a problem that has been growing for years because the supply of people who know the tech stack is decreasing. It's fair to point out to people you don't think they understand the problem.

3. Misunderstood? I believe they implied in their first sentence I was correct and that they understood the point. They just didn't like the point.

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