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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

#91

Post by whiplash451 »

gspencley wrote: post #16
dweekly wrote: post #6

A: This is great! Perl is much maligned but a fantastic Swiss army chainsaw and still runs so much critical infrastructure. B: I find it concerning that $25k is a notable donation; is the Foundation doing that poorly? I would have hoped this number to have two more digits in it for it to be a front page worthy item.

I'm surprised to learn that Perl is still used. Obviously there will always be legacy code to maintain but these days I can't even remember the last time Perl was mentioned in casual conversation amongst my peers unless we're sharing war stories from the 90s. These days when we find ourselves needing to write a script our first go-to would be bash, and if we need more features or if it's going to be complex enough to…

You'd be surprised to see how much COBOL is still used as well then.

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

#92

Post by beernet »

mtmail wrote: post #74
beernet wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Short "Exactly true", "Yes", "I agree" or "+1" comments add little to a discussion and I see those regularly downvoted.

I was referring to the comment I replied to being downvoted. That being said, I agree with you, my point still stands though.

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

#93

Post by psunavy03 »

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.

The next 15-20 years are going to be entertaining as the world finally runs out of COBOL developers.

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

#94

Post by carlosjobim »

anticorporate wrote: post #55
sneak wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gifts don’t require repayment. Releasing free software is a gift to the world. Corporations don’t owe free software maintainers a cent, because people using your software doesn’t cost you anything.

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.

That's honestly the sneakiest suggestion for implementation of communism I've heard so far in my life. Give away low quality software for free, then later demand that the government force people who want nothing to do with you or your code to pay you for your efforts. It's parasitic on several different levels.

Then all FOSS hackers will be like Khrushchev, wondering why Western industry always outproduced his own, even though the Soviets "where doing everything right".

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

#96

Post by kqr »

gspencley wrote: post #16
dweekly wrote: post #6

A: This is great! Perl is much maligned but a fantastic Swiss army chainsaw and still runs so much critical infrastructure. B: I find it concerning that $25k is a notable donation; is the Foundation doing that poorly? I would have hoped this number to have two more digits in it for it to be a front page worthy item.

I'm surprised to learn that Perl is still used. Obviously there will always be legacy code to maintain but these days I can't even remember the last time Perl was mentioned in casual conversation amongst my peers unless we're sharing war stories from the 90s. These days when we find ourselves needing to write a script our first go-to would be bash, and if we need more features or if it's going to be complex enough to…

In contrast to other people, I'm fairly young (low 30s) and I use Perl a lot. I've outlined my reasoning before[1] but it boils down to (a) very quick to get going, (b) runs everwhere I care about, (c) great compatibility story, and (d) can scale up to large applications in a pinch.

[1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/why-perl

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

#97

Post by jefftk »

samus wrote: post #84
jefftk wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been an open source maintainer (and still am to a smaller degree) and I think sneak is right. I'm happy for people to use things I create and release, and their use doesn't impose costs on me.

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…

> Where do you draw the line between extending your project and providing free labor to a for-profit company?

I work on my various projects to the extent that it is fun. If it stops being fun, I don't do it. Making something broadly useful is generally more fun than helping someone with a one-off thing, though that is not my decision criteria.

If someone wants me to do something that isn't fun, they can offer me money, though they will generally need to offer me enough more money than it isn't worth it.

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

#98

Post by cafard »

gertlex wrote: post #38
cafard wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to say, Hey, I use Perl, but then I saw this posting with the over 45 qualification. Yep, that's me (way over). Honestly, I write about a script a quarter in Perl, but it definitely is handy now and then.

Curious: do you also do script-writing in other languages? And just pull out perl for a subset of problems? Or are most things at the "bigger than a script" level for you? I'm not here to judge. I still prefer to write my python scripts like it's the 2.7 days... (more effort goes to python "code")

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, and I can count on cscript being on the machine and running such scripts.

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

#99

Post by hnisoss »

_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?

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...

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

#100

Post by worik »

gspencley wrote: post #16
dweekly wrote: post #6

A: This is great! Perl is much maligned but a fantastic Swiss army chainsaw and still runs so much critical infrastructure. B: I find it concerning that $25k is a notable donation; is the Foundation doing that poorly? I would have hoped this number to have two more digits in it for it to be a front page worthy item.

I'm surprised to learn that Perl is still used. Obviously there will always be legacy code to maintain but these days I can't even remember the last time Perl was mentioned in casual conversation amongst my peers unless we're sharing war stories from the 90s. These days when we find ourselves needing to write a script our first go-to would be bash, and if we need more features or if it's going to be complex enough to…

> these days I can't even remember the last time Perl was mentioned in casual conversation amongst my peers

You need better peers

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