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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

#201

Post by that_guy_iain »

pjmlp wrote: post #199
that_guy_iain wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP was ignoring the point and basically implied the reason banks have issues hiring these days is because they're banks. While in the past they didn't have these issues. Why? Because tech stack matters for a lot of people.

They always had these issues, I barely know anyone that freely replied to job interviews for a bank, given the work environment, as I am approaching 50y, have already seen quite a lot in consulting projects.

They had the same problems everyone had. There are more jobs than programmers to do the jobs. But now they've got the added problem of Rust, Go, etc taking over.

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

#202

Post by krageon »

dep_b wrote: post #189
krageon wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Were you a contractor or did you have an actual employment contract?

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

#203

Post by cafard »

creer wrote: post #197
cafard wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally, if the script is more than a one-off, I will write in Python, since all the young seem to know Python, and very few seem to know Perl. There are two recurring jobs that I have not rewritten from Perl, one because "pack" is so handy. The only other language I use much for scripting is Javascript, or rather Jscript, for our accounting department sometimes needs files munged for integration into Great Plains,…

Do most of them even "know python" or just the crudest parts of python?

I'm not sure how to answer that. Some can write a short, personally useful script. Some can do much more. Which are the crudest parts of Python, and which are less or not at all crude?

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

#204

Post by creer »

cafard wrote: post #203
creer wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do most of them even "know python" or just the crudest parts of python?

I'm not sure how to answer that. Some can write a short, personally useful script. Some can do much more. Which are the crudest parts of Python, and which are less or not at all crude?

Languages have deep features. That's why people create new ones (except for PHP perhaps). You can write BASIC in any language you want, it's still BASIC.

Languages systems or environments have still other deep features themselves. The library or module systems in Python or Perl or Raku do not work the same.

Being able to write "a short, personally useful script.", is a great start. And does not count as "knowing Python" except for the purpose of inflated resumes. The clichés of complaining about "line noise" or WORN (write once read never) - since the fine article was about Perl - counts specifically as "not having learned Perl".

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

#205

Post by creer »

cafard wrote: post #36
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.

Most of the someone else's I have read has been in stuff from CPAN, and I recall it as pretty good. I have written some pretty bad Perl, and wish that I had encountered the O'Reilly Perl Best Practices long before I did.

Perl's "layering" is one of its most brilliant features. You start learning Perl in layers; achieve some fluency and effectiveness and understanding of the general principles - and will still have many layers and sets of features that you can dig into as you progress. The set of O'Reilly books was amazing for this. Still is. But the documentation itself was amazing also. Still is. That's one problem with Raku: Can raku ever get to this level?

This is important as a powerful tool for a powerful programmer.

I always contrast this to C++ - where you are dangerous, too dangerous, until you have learned a huge amount "of the language" (and good luck understanding it). Or BASIC, where... there isn't much.

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

#206

Post by singingfish »

akira2501 wrote: post #150
singingfish wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nah, it was created for their day job in order to provide reliable quick to write code under difficult conditions

I meant the company did not participate in it's creation nor did they fund it in any way. If they had they certainly would not have approved of it being released under an open source license. Also Perl 1.0 was released using Larry's NASA email address and not any other corporate one.

I believe it was NSA not NASA - in his hubristic style larry wall described perl as being born from "a secret project in a secret laboratory".

I'd say the biggest influence on my programming work is recognising how to use that style of humour can help deal with situations that can sometimes get to quite high pressure - e.g. "please rescue this failing 9 month long $x^e6 project before it goes live in the next fortnight"

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

#207

Post by lelele »

sneak wrote: post #186
pjmlp wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean? Would you please elaborate on that?

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

#208

Post by samus »

renewiltord wrote: post #146
samus wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their use doesn't, but from time to time they send in bug reports and feature requests, don't they? Where do you draw the line between extending your project and providing free labor to a for-profit company? Fixing bugs is less controversial, while finding solutions to issues arising in bespoke production environments, with short deadlines, is grueling work for which companies are usually gladly purchasing support co…

Bug reports are other people doing work for me. I’m fine with that. These are free interactions between people. If you want to charge for bug reports then you can put that in your repo text and just auto-close any issue from non-approved authors. If you want to bountysource a solution do that. If you don’t want to fix an issue don’t.

Filing a bug report is only half of the work. The bug then has to be reproduced, fixed, tested, documented, and rolled out. Sometimes with a deadline.

If that sounds fun to you, I really cannot argue against it. Usually, that is part of a support contract, and therefore hobbyist open source developers basically supply free labor to for-profit companies.

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

#209

Post by kazinator »

shagie wrote: post #114
gregw2 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 esp…

> people talking about having to learn a new LISP (or Scheme) each time they switch to a different company.

Which people, where? Do you have a URL to a discussion?

I've not seen heard or read such talk almost 25 years of being involved in open source Lisp. Needless to say, I've often seen such narrative repeated by programmers not working in Lisp, who heard it from such others.

Someone talking about any industry work in Lisp whatsoever, even just one job, from any angle, is extremely rare.

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

#210

Post by landyacht »

_swfb wrote: 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?

Perl and Raku are grouped together today primarily for historical reasons. Yes, Raku started as Perl 6 and is certainly a Perl-inspired language, but the rename happened precisely because it is so different.

Regarding regexes, Raku introduces a whole new syntax, makes whitespace non-meaningful by default, and allows regexes to be named and then composed/reused. Those three changes, along with helpful modules like Grammar::Tracer, make reading and writing regexes a totally different experience. It's still going to look like noise at first, of course, but even then the syntax parallels normal code far better than PCREs, so you're more likely to make a correct guess about what something means.

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