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DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation
- joyajajha 2y ago[flagged]
- joyajajhad 2y ago[flagged]
- jmclnx 2y agoAs a duckduckgo user, I think this is great. FWIW, Perl is still on my list to learn :) edit: fixed spelling
- pjmlp 2y agoRegardless of its fame, it is a worthy tool on UNIX environments, even nowadays.
- imglorp 2y agoLast I heard, DDG used it in production.
- pjmlp 2y agoAs does Booking.com, and plenty of sysadmins.
- gtirloni 2y agoIt's an absolute technical liability to build anything new in Perl these days.
- pjmlp 2y agoOr not. I could assert the same about C since Morris Worm, and here we are.
- rurban 2y agoIt's more of a technical liability to write anything new in Python. All of my old perl code still runs fine, all of my python code went unusable since. It's also extremely bloated.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoI upgraded to Debian 12 and all of a sudden my Python 3 code is destroyed and I have to jump through hoops to make pip work correctly again for libraries that were already on my machine. I'm leaving for greener pastures as the webdevs have ruined another good scripting language.
- forgetfreeman 2y agoPerl 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.
- thwd 2y agoIt's a write-only language.
- knowitnone 2y agoWrite Once Read Never(WORN)
- speed_spread 2y agoProgramming is an individual activity; developing software is a social activity. Current tools and teaching are still biased in favor of the former, resulting in most of our troubles in the latter.
- forgetfreeman 2y agoThe legend of the 10x programmer certainly didn't do our industry any favors either.
- shagie 2y agoAs 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 dalliance or occasional debugging ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16219876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16219876 ).
- gregw2 2y agoOne 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...
- dweekly 2y agoA: 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.
- autarch 2y agoHere's some details about the foundation's financials - https://blogs.perl.org/users/makoto_nozaki/2024/10/understanding-the-financials-of-the-perl-and-raku-foundation-tprf.html https://blogs.perl.org/users/makoto_nozaki/2024/10/understan...
- verelo 2y agoSo yeah, they’re doing rough… Not sure what the path out here is? Seems like either finding deep pockets that care about their work or some new revenue stream, but without the cash to fund it I’m not sure how.
- portaouflop 2y agoStop doing it for free it the only way, OSS projects that rely on donations almost always do badly economically
- knowitnone 2y agook. say they charge every user or business $100 a year. that would certainly kill off Perl
- portaouflop 2y agoI’m not saying it’s practical right now, but yea the death of Perl is the only thing that can make it profitable.
- _hcuq 2y ago
- tiffanyh 2y agoOT: Craigslist is also built on Perl and hired Larry Wall (creator) years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14345022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14345022
- esaym 2y agoCraigslist 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 donate nothing. A good case in point is AT&t in the 1980s was broken up into 20 plus different companies. They were then remerged back in the 1990s. But when they merged, they had 20 different computer systems and perl was actually used to glue all those systems together and handle data sanitation and ETL pipelines. Yet AT&t never donated anything to perl.
- tyingq 2y agobooking.com is, I think, still a heavy Perl user. I don't know to what degree they give back.
- johannes1234321 2y agoAt least for a while they had quite a bunch of core perl people on their payroll
- dep_b 2y agoIt’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.
- that_guy_iain 2y agoI 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.
- whiplash451 2y agoYou'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.
- revskill 2y agoDo perl support typescript ?
- barryrandall 2y agoAll TypeScript is valid perl if you apply the right regex.
- captn3m0 2y agoRelevant: Zerodha's Floss.fund is giving $1M this year for FOSS projects, and haven't got enough applications. Please apply and share: https://floss.fund/ https://floss.fund/ > FLOSS/fund is dedicated to supporting critical, impactful, and valuable Free/Libre and Open Source projects globally. We give up to $1 million per year to support developers and communities that create and maintain projects, big and small.
- yawaramin 2y agoThis reminds me of Evan Czaplicki's great talk where he basically traces the funding of most modern programming languages to search engine revenues :-) https://youtu.be/XZ3w_jec1v8?si=zdL6v9P8LnT7Cbal https://youtu.be/XZ3w_jec1v8?si=zdL6v9P8LnT7Cbal
- _swfb 2y agoI 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?
- sigzero 2y agoRaku is Perl on steroids "basically". It is still pretty slow the last I read something on it. I always enjoyed Perl even as a beginner.
- orev 2y agoRegex and is a separate language used by many tools, Perl just made it nicely integrated into the language, and also made some nice enhancements. Don’t blame issues with regex on Perl.
- SushiHippie 2y ago> [...] asking why they used Perl, and he responded back, which was nice of him. Do you still know what the reason was?
- _swfb 2y agoI actually still have the email. Here's what I sent: Hello! I don't have a lot to say to you, but I just wanted to say that about a month ago, I started the transition away from Google, and the most obvious thing to switch was search. DuckDuckGo has improved substantially since the last time I used it (around 2012), and it's to a point where the results are comparable, and sometimes even better than Google, so changing was pretty seamless. Now the only Google-thing I need to remove from my life is YouTube. As a somewhat technical person, I was curious about one thing; I saw that the primary language for DuckDuckGo is Perl. Without making any judgement here, was there a particular reason for that choice? Also, are you planning to move to Perl 6? Anyway, I appreciate you reading my email. DuckDuckGo is a great service, and I hope you guys keep up the good work! -Thomas Gebert. Here was his response: Yes, though, the primary language is Perl. It was out of convenience and interest since that was my primary language when I started the project. There was/are a lot of libraries useful for text processing / web crawling. Now Python and other libraries have been similarly built up.
- ricardo81 2y agoGood for them. They don't have to but they chose to. What they have done (perform around 100M searches a day) is phenomenal. Testament to their marketing. Unfortunately as a search engine, it's still just a skin of another one, with some additional small scale projects attached. It's slightly surprising that DDG hasn't attempted to become a 'real' search engine, rather than being a meta. At the moment they make a subset of Bing's revenue per search, never mind what Google make.
- shrubble 2y agoAnother post in the thread mentions ATT; I can confirm that at another large telecom, Perl is still used in quite a few places, and is still being used for some new projects as well.
- oalders 2y agoIf you don't mind sharing this info, I'd love to hear about it. :) I'm olaf@perlfoundation.org
- handzhiev 2y agoGenuine question: is someone starting projects in Perl/Raku? If yes, what made you choose it?
- 7thaccount 2y agoI really wish Raku would pick up some steam. A really cool language.
- librasteve 2y agoWonders why raku is not really mentioned in the discussion? Then I remembered my daily mantra: - NO_ONE cares about the community - WHAT_THEY_NEED is UniCode & Rats - WHAT_THEY_LIKE is poetry (not golfing, but an expressive professional medium not desecrated by ‘public void’ line noise) - WHAT_THEY_KNOW is CPAN, DWIM and REGEX (the easy is easy and the hard is possible) - WHAT_THEY_WANT is Grammar, Functional, OO, Declarative, Concurrency, Dynamic Type … oh and Procedural done v clean - WHAT_THEY_HAVE is PHP, Ruby, Python, C#, Go, Perl5, ECMAScript, Java — demand for raku is pent up. So, I detect some natural frustration within and without the community. Keep the faith. We have a new audience, they value truth and beauty, and a story of battling the odds. They need this TECHNOLOGY. It is [perl6 | raku] – who cares. It may have to start in academia, it may have to start in the p5 stalwarts. It will ignite. Finish the journey. Do not deny your heritage.